Archive for: ati
PC enthusiasts who happen to favor the mobile life and carry a portable gaming rig to prove it will no doubt be interested in AMD’s latest offering — the newly announced 6990M mobile GPU. Said silicon is up 25% faster than competing cards according to AMD. For the real nerds, specs include:
- Memory: 2 GB GDDR5 Memory w/ 256-bit bus @ 900 MHz
- Power:1.6 TFLOPs of computing power @ 115.2 GB/s
The titles used to make such claims include: Batman Arkham Asylum, Dragon Age 2, Shogun 2, BattleForge, Left 4 Dead, Metro2033, Wolfenstein MP, The Chronicles of Riddick, and E.T.: Quake Wars. Yeah, not the most demanding list of games on the market. Still, it goes without saying there’s a lot of power to be had here.
As we don’t have either a GTX 580M or 6990M on hand to put head-to-head, we’ll have to wait for the various PC enthusiast sites to crunch the numbers and tell us who the real king is.
Look for the AMD 6990M to join the option boxes alongside Nvidia’s GTX 580M in laptops such as the Alienware M18X and Clevo’s P170HM and P150HM laptops very soon.
Image Credit: hw-lab
The above image depicting a so-called “7990″ GPU is rather interesting considering the dual-GPU 6990 was just released a few weeks back. Though if the specs above are anywhere close to what we’ll see in the final retail version of AMD’s next-gen top-tier card, we’re more than willing to wait.
TFLOP potential comes in 12.16 and 3.04 for single/dual-point precision respectively. The card reportedly features 6400 Stream Processors, 3200 SPs per GPU, a 384-bit memory bus, and 6 GB of GDDR5 memory. With all that power on tap, the 7990′s memory bandwidth can theoretically hit 576 GB/s over PCIe 3.0! Connection options come in the form of DVI, mini-HDMI and DisplayPort, and support AMD Eyefinity and AMD HD3D capabilities.
Of course, the really impressive stat is that all the power above results in a power output of ~300W under full load and 37W-40W idle. Who’s looking at their 6990 in disgust now…?
- February 28, 2011 7:03 am
PC enthusiasts have an exciting March to look forward to. Not only is Nvidia’s dual-GPU 590 rumored to be dropping later in the month, but AMD’s own dual-GPU solution (6990) will be coming even earlier — rumored to be as soon as March 8th. Currently, AMD is said to be finalizing the SKU and planning to have partners ready to go for an official release by said date.
For those not well versed in the land of computer hardware, “dual-GPU” in regards to the 6990 (and GTX 590) simply means that their are two GPU cores on one PCB. (Essentially two graphics cards crammed on to one.) This not only allows uses with smaller cases to save space, but also makes tri- and quad-GPU configurations easier and more energy efficient.
Official pricing hasn’t been released yet, but we’d expect the 6990 to ding your banking account between $600-$700. Expensive — yes. But for those who want only the fastest, it is the only option.
Update
AMD 6990 officially outed. Specs, price, and specific release date still unknown.
Update 2
A rear-end shot after the jump…
It may not be an * official* unveiling, but it is welcome nonetheless. AMD’s Matt Skynner displayed the gem you see above at a Fusion APU press event in lands far from here. While no specs or actual mention was offered for the device itself, the new black with red racing stripes design signals it is the latest generation of card. And, the two silver spots seen on the back of the card are nothing else but dual gpu cores.
If we go on current speculation, the upcoming AMD 6990 will come with 3,840 stream processors total (half and half) and 4GB of memory pumped through dual-DVI and tri-mini-DisplayPort connections. Finally, power requirements are somewhere along the lines of 30/300 idle/load. Look for more information on the AMD 6990 in the second half of February.
- December 27, 2010 8:07 am
As any true PC enthusiast knows, it’s not the biggest, highest end, fastest piece of hardware that is most sought after. It’s the cheapest part you can snag that can be overclocked and hacked to run as fast or better than the high-end offering. In the world of custom computers, the two heaviest modded parts are easily processor and video card. Both pieces benefit greatly from faster clocks, unlocked cores, etc., etc. Today’s story of unlocking hidden potential comes by way of the recently released AMD 6950 and 6970 graphics cards. Would you believe you can get all the performance of the 6970 in the cheaper 6950?
Well, you can — because they’re the same exact card. The only difference the two cards is that the higher-end 6970 has a few more unified shaders unlocked — 1536 vs. the 6950′s stock count of 1408.
But the best part about this new-found power is that it’s easily obtained. A simple bios flash on your 6950 will get the job done. At this point, there is absolutely no reason to pay extra for the 6970. With that said, I can’t imagine AMD will be too happy to see such information released, that’s there fault for designing the card the way they did.
In the meantime, I suggest you hop to it. Who knows how long AMD will let this hack run rampant. I’m sure a future update will some how block the feature highlighted above. But as we’ve seen today, the PC enthusiast crowd is persistent and determined. Another cat and mouse game in the making?
Get the full list of instructions and needed files over at Tech Power Up.
- December 13, 2010 4:54 pm
If there’s one thing modern gamers should come to realize, it’s this: Drivers can make or break a game. Glancing through various hardware reviews, graphics cards in particular, one can see that certain games cater to a particular hardware platform (Nvidia or AMD) over the other. Though, with driver updates extra FPS can be extracted. The reliance on drivers is further highlighted when multiple GPU setups are concerned.
With that said, today’s GPU update comes courtesy of AMD with their latest Catalyst 10.12 Preview drivers. Available now, this latest update will bring among other things, a heavily refined user interface and layout. If you’ve used AMD’s Catalyst Control Center within the last year or two, you’ve probably come to the conclusion that some TLC was definitely needed. That gripe appears to be getting some attention with the latest Catalyst release.
On the performance front however, the various PC enthusiast websites are still running their battery of benchmarks, so hard numbers aren’t yet available. In the meantime, hop inside to check out a few screenshots of the new layout…
- December 13, 2010 6:33 am
AMD isn’t set to unveil their next generation 97xx cards until December 15th, but BSN was fortunate enough to snag the final launch details and specifications a tad early, complete with several slides. The short version is this: the 6970 should be anywhere from 5%-25% faster than an Nvidia GTX 480. Furthermore, CrossFireX scaling is said to be “a thing of the past”, with the 6970 cards featuring “awesome” GPU scaling as AMD claims.
On that note, one small worry we have is the comparison AMD uses — an Nvidia GTX 480. The card is on its way out and being replaced with the GTX 580 which itself is 10%-20% faster than a GTX 480. So when all is said and done, the AMD 6970 is only going to be ~10% better than the GTX 580 at best. This is all preliminary assumption of course. Though it is interesting to highlight nonetheless.
BSN has the full rundown. Check it out…
- November 29, 2010 10:46 am
Looks like the holiday season is going to be a good season for PC enthusiasts. While the desktop front has the Nvidia GTX 580 and GTX 570 as well as the AMD 69xx GPU’s to look after, the mobile sphere will have their own crown figures. On that note, two new mobile GPU’s popped up on AMD’s website over the weekend — the 6300m and 6500m.
The 6300m has GPU clocks that run at either 500MHz or 750MHz as well as memory clocks of 1600MHz or 1800MHz (GDDR3). The 6300m also features 320 stream processors and 8 texture units with a total output of 120Gflops. The more beastly (on paper anyway) 6500m features 400 stream processors and 20 texture units, which ends up resulting in 520Gflops of processing power. The clocks for that chip are 500MHz or 650MHz for the core and 1800MHz (GDDR3) or 3600MHz (GDDR5).
Besides the obvious ties to mobile gaming, hardware acceleration support, Blu-ray playback, and 3D support are among the other top concerns. Rounding out the list of features includes 7.1 surround audio and AMD’s multi-display Eyefinity support — up to 4 monitors for the 6300m and 6 monitors for the 6500m.
Expect prices and release information to follow fairly closely…
- November 22, 2010 7:49 am
The ongoing rival between AMD/ATI and Nvidia just got a little hotter today, for Nvidia is claiming AMD/ATI is fuding their stats a bit. Now, each side is guilty of playing the numbers game more than once before. So what is any different now? Well, besides end users having the ability to change quality settings within games, graphics cards manufacturers have default settings of their own baked into the cards’ drivers. It is this setting (relating to texture filtering specifically) that Nvidia is claiming that AMD is “cheating” on.
More to the point, Nvidia claims to use the default “high” setting where as the latest 10.10 Catalyst drivers for AMD cards are actually knocked down to “quality”. The result is a roughly 10% improvement in framerates. Naturally, there are a few people that will be rather disappointed that the latest driver updates didn’t really improve performance at all, and instead was nothing more than a lowering of quality settings to gain fps.
In Nvidia’s blog post calling out AMD, they site several reputable 3rd party sites, all of whom do extensive computer hardware reviews and testing. So to say Nvidia is simply chopping their opponent in the knees isn’t quite true.
Overall, it’s definitely worth a minute of your time to read Nvidia’s claims as well as check out the individual 3rd party accounts on the matter. Fanboy eruption in 3..2..
