In the wake of the HD 6900 series debut last month, the Barts GPU and its place in the product line finally makes perfect sense. The Cypress chip, as used on the Radeon HD 5830 with 334 square millimeters of silicon, is way too big for just 1120 shaders and 16 ROPS. The new Barts GPU uses just 255 mm2 to do the same job only better, thanks to twice the number of ROPs as the 5830. Although TSMC denied AMD the opportunity to roll out 32nm-based chips for this product cycle, they went back to the drawing board and optimized this new generation of GPUs for the current 40nm manufacturing process. AMD did a better job of reading the rule book last time, and their first full line of 40nm GPUs dominated the graphics market for a full 6 months. AMD has now successfully inserted an additional class of GPU (as defined by die size), to fill the performance gap that existed in the Radeon HD 5000 series. You may have seen some benchmarks already for some reference HD 6870 cards, but please follow along with Benchmark Reviews as we take a complete look, inside and out, at the PowerColor PCS+ HD6870 1GB GDDR5 graphics card.