While the Barts GPU added merely had a tessellator upgrade (to what ATI is called its 8th Gen Tessellator, which allows off-chip buffering) the Cayman design of the Radeon HD 6900-series has two entire front-end units. However, we’ve been expecting ATI to get a bit more radical for a while – after all, a GPU with only one tessellator and one setup engine is starting to look a bit anachronistic these days. With the names out of the way, let’s stuck into what’s inside the silicon that makes a Cayman worthy of its HD 6900 name.Ī Dual Front-End DesignWhile Nvidia went nuts with its Fermi design, breaking apart the elements of a typical GPU front-end and scattering them throughout the chip, ATI has been much more reserved. There is a plan to release a dual-GPU card based on two Cayman GPUs which we assume will be called the Radeon HD 6990 4GB. The Radeon HD 6950 2GB and Radeon HD 6970 2GB are therefore both single-GPU cards. However, because ATI needed the HD 5700-series to exist with the HD 6000-series, ‘Radeon HD 6800’ was already taken. Previously ATI has reserved the HD x900 family branding for its dual-GPU cards to give a bolder indication to the customer that a dual-GPU card should be much faster than a single-GPU HD x800-series card. We still plan to switch when AMD’s Fusion APU is launched in early 2011, as it’ll be silly to talk about a single piece of silicon that has both AMD and ATI technology. We’re sticking with calling these cards ATI Radeons because that’s what most people know them as, and AMD has said that it’s fine with it partners gradually transitioning from ATI to AMD Graphics until 2011. But while the Barts GPU of the HD 6800 looked more like an overclocked HD 5830 with a tweaked front-end unit, the Cayman GPU of the Radeon HD 6900 is a completely new design throughout.īefore we plunge into the details of the new GPU, let’s clear up the naming. The previous Radeon HD 6800-series got our hopes up in two ways – firstly it sounded like it’d be more than a mid-range GPU that went toe-to-toe with Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 460 cards, and secondly it wasn’t all that new. US price (as reviewed) $369 (ex tax) MSRP UK price (as reviewed) £310 (inc VAT) MSRP

Radeon hd 6970 2gb