AMD makes public its High-end HD 6900 Series GPUs

Bangalore: Based on 40nm manufacturing process made Cayman GPU, featuring second generation DirectX 11 capable microarchitecture, two new models, HD 6970 and HD 6950, have been unveiled officially. Promising faster and relatively cheaper video cards, the new HD 6900 series are expected to deliver a better performance than their predecessors and competitors GTX 500 series. Built from the TSMC 40nm manufacturing process, new AMD Radeon HD 6970 graphics card has 1536 stream processors and graphics core clocked at 880MHz. The HD 6950 graphics card has 1408 stream processors with graphics core clocked at 800MHz. Both cards come with 2048MB GDDR5 video memory with 256-bit memory bus bandwidth. However, the effective memory clock of HD 6970 runs at 5500MHz frequency while the one in HD 6950 runs at 5000MHz. Cayman GPU has less number of stream processors compared to the HD 5800 series Cypress GPUS (1600 stream processors) and is packed with more transistors. However, these new HD 6900 series GPU come with dual 8th generation tessellation units that promise to deliver up to 2.9 times tessellation performance improvement compared to HD 5870 graphics. As the new AMD PowerTune technology is supported by the new HD 6900 series graphics cards that allow automatic adjustment of GPU power consumption by having a control on the graphics core clock speed vigorously. The new HD 6900 series graphics cards are capable of handling Stereoscopic 3D or AMD HD 3D support for games as well as movies. Of course you get to enjoy the best graphics since both support DirectX 11 technology. A richer and clear video playback is the assurance of AMDs EyeSpeed technology. Also, the third generation Unified Video Decoder technology promises best usage of the beastly hardware for H.264 and VC-1 videos playback acceleration. The first graphics card to support DisplayPort 1.2 specifications and HDMI 1.4a specification is AMD Radeon HD 6970. Radeon HD 6970 and HD 6950 graphics cards from different add-in card manufacturers like ASUS, ZOTAC, MSI, HIS, and so on, would be available in a short span of time. Officially, HD 6970 GPU is priced at $370 ( 16, 820 approx.) while HD 6950 is priced at $300 ( 13, 640 approx.).