All press that are reviewing Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 cards have received a rather interesting email from AMD today. Though we don't have it / were contacted about it by NVIDIA whatsoever, it seems that NV or Ubisoft has been distributing a a new H.A.W.X. 2 benchmark for use with upcoming reviews. AMD is actively asking not to use this benchmark that NVIDIA is pushing, alleging that the results are not objective, have a peek at what we received:

Hi,

It has come to our attention that you may have received an early build of a benchmark based on the upcoming Ubisoft title H.A.W.X. 2.  I'm sure you are fully aware that the timing of this benchmark is not coincidental and is an attempt by our competitor to negatively influence your reviews of the AMD Radeon HD6800 series products.  We suggest you do not use this benchmark at present as it has known issues with its implementation of DirectX 11 tessellation and does not serve as a useful indicator of performance for the HD 6800 series.  A quick comparison of the performance data in H.A.W.X. 2, with tessellation on, and that of other games/benchmarks will demonstrate how unrepresentative H.A.W.X. 2 performance is of real world performance.

AMD has demonstrated to Ubisoft tessellation performance improvements that benefit all GPUs, but the developer has chosen not to implement them in the preview benchmark.  For that reason, we are working on a driver-based solution in time for the final release of the game that improves performance without sacrificing image quality.  In the meantime we recommend you hold off using the benchmark as it will not provide a useful measure of performance relative to other DirectX 11 games using tessellation.

As always for reasons like above, amongst others, we'll stick to our benchmark suite as always, making sure that both parties have equal chances.