The ASUS Radeon HD 6850 shatters the DirectX 11 affordability barrier being priced at a mere $179. Never before has high-resolution full-detail gaming be available for so little money. Thanks to AMD's aggressive pricing, NVIDIA has also announced price drops on their own, and there's probably more to come.
AMD's architectural improvements in the HD 6800 Series have not been to the core architecture but adress weak spots like the tesselation engine. Another field of advancement is the display output logic which has been expanded on again, giving AMD even more margin against NVIDIA here. Support for DisplayPort 1.2 allows up to six displays connected to a single card and enables daisy chaining and hub functionality for easier monitor hook up. HDMI 1.4 includes support for Blu-ray 3D titles which seems to be more of a features list bullet point than a real need-to-have feature at this time.
AMD also managed to reduce power consumption even further, boosting performance per Watt some more. Unfortunately Blu-ray power consumption has been missed in these optimizations which results in a power consumption increase vs. the HD 5000 Series in that scenario. In terms of fan noise the ASUS HD 6850 comes at roughly the same noise level as the HD 5850 - actually a bit more. This is surprising considering the improvements in power consumption and suggest that engineering focus has been lacking here.
We have seen outstanding overclocking potential on the ASUS HD 6850 Direct CU. Basically the card overclocks to HD 6870 performance levels without any increase in fan speed or voltage. If you are willing to push some more juice through your card you can even go well beyond 1000 MHz. Overall very impressive.
If you are looking for the best price/performance in the sub $200 segment then the choice will be between the HD 6850 and the GTX 460 768 MB. Both cards overclock very well, the most notably difference being CUDA/PhysX support on the GTX 460 and vastly more display output options on the HD 6850. The difference between 768 MB and 1 GB makes no significant difference in most games. At this point it probably comes down to brand preference - or future price cuts.