After various rumors regarding AMD's plans to release a 1GB version of the HD 6970 hit the Web, the card has now finally become official since the Sunnyvale based company confirmed its existence as well as the introduction of a line of factory overclocked Radeon HD 6870 graphics cards.
Various board partners plan to release such cards staring in mid-February for $279 in the U.S, according to an AMD statement cited by Xbit Labs.
The new cards, with 1GB of on-board graphics memory, will be based on the fully-fledged version of the Cayman core, which features 1536 stream processors.
These are accompanied by 96 texturing units, 32 ROPs and a 256-bit wide memory bus.
The regular 2GB version has its GPU clocked at 880MHz while the memory runs at 1.375GHz (5.5GHz effective GDDR5), but no mention was made about the clock speeds used by the 1GB version of the HD 6970.
If clocked similarly, the Radeon HD 6970 1GB will be a great alternative to the HD 6950 as it comes about $20 cheaper while featuring more processing power.
High resolutions and high FSAA settings will most certainly reduce the performance gap between the two solutions, even drawing the fight in HD 6950's favor, but in most other games, the 1GB edition will be pretty close to the regular HD 6970.
At $279.99, the HD 6970 1GB will also be similarly priced to the GTX 560 Ti, a card the 2GB version has no problems surpassing, according to some early benchmarks that were recently leaked onto the Web.
Together with the HD 6970 1GB, AMD has also announced Xbit Labs that various board vendors, like PowerColor, Sapphire Technologies and XFX, plan to release factory overclocked versions of the Radeon HD 6870 with GPU and memory frequencies varying between 940MHz - 975MHz, and 4400MHz - 4600GHz, respectively.
Prices will range between $229 to $259 in e-tail depending on model.
A 1GB version of the HD 6950 was not mentioned anywhere in the article, but nonetheless, competition is definitely going to heat up in the mainstream graphics market.
Source: SOFTPEDIA
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