Unigine's Heaven tessellation has been and one of the biggest weaknesses of the HD 5000 series, possibly signifying weak tessellation performance for future games. Typical scores for 1920x1200 4xAA Extreme are 900+ for the GTX 480 and 500+ for the HD 5870. Amazingly, the HD 6870 scores a whopping 922, which is a massive increase over the HD 5870 and puts it on par with the GTX 480. Do note, however, that the previous results were on Heaven 2.0, whereas the HD 6870 benchmarks use Heaven 2.1.
If true, these numbers are looking very good, and well beyond general expectations. The HD 6870 is well poised to be the fastest single GPU ever, even though AMD use a small die / dual-GPU strategy.
