AMD unveils its Radeon HD6900 series

THE RADEON 6900 series is AMD's latest graphics processing unit range it's shouting about with promises of top banana performance and something called Powertune, which held things up a bit.

AMD has announced that the Radeon HD 6900 series cards are available for purchase from Scan, ebuyer and Overclockers at the following prices, £225 (inc. VAT) for the HD 6950 and £279 (inc. VAT) for the HD 6970.

Using the new Cayman chip the first two cards for this series are the Radeon HD 6970 and the Radeon HD 6950. Note no mention of ATI as part of the re-branding of AMD GPU products.

And AMD is pushing out all the publicity stops when it describes the HD6970 as a "superior enthusiast GPU" but whether that is a superior enthusiast or superior GPU is anyone guess. The HD6950 description is equally ambiguous with AMD saying it is simply in a "class of its own." Hopefully, not the remedial class.

Both are manufactured with a 40nm scale process, both have 2.64 billion transistors, both have GDDR5 RAM but that is where the similarities end.

The HD6970 has a 880MHz clock speed compared to the HD6950's 800MHz, the HD6970 has 1,536 stream processors while the HD6950 has 1,408, the HD6970 has 96 texture units and a compute performance of 2.7TFLOPS while the HD6950 is at 88 texture units and 2.25TFLOPS, respectively.

Maximum power for the two GPUs is 250W for the HD6970 and 200W for the 6950. But AMD predicts a lower 190W and 140W for "typical gaming power" for the HD6970 and HD6950 respectively. In terms of ports both have two miniDP, one HDMI 1.4a and two DVI. Both GPUs can support up to six screens and obviously it is all Directx 11 capable.

The series suffered a delay due to development of Powertune, AMD told the briefing last week. Essentially Powertune is designed to improve gaming performance with better power managament, which preferably means using less power, according to AMD. This is not an overclocking tool, Powertune will not push the TDP of the GPU.

Powertune is controlled through the Catalyst Control Center. The example given of what could be achieved was Aliens vs Predator where a 10 per cent decrease in power still delivered almost the same number of frames per second, about 55.

Another little extra is the dual BIOS toggle switches the GPUs now have. These allow an original BIOS to be kept on the GPU and a second BIOS installed. But if the BIOS is to be changed again you have a problem. µ