AMD are taking their revised architecture further with the release of the HD6970 and HD6950. The former will be their flagship single GPU solution and targets NVIDIA's GTX570 whilst the HD6950 is priced in a class of its own. The Cayman architecture brings a number of benefits in the form of more efficient graphics through their refined VLIW4 architecture, 96 texture units and upgraded render back for improved anti-aliasing performance. What it also means is that the two cards will provide improvements in performance per die size. It should therefore come as no surprise that the HD6970 and HD6950 will sport 1536 and 1408 stream processors respectively to maintain increased performance in a smaller package. Much higher memory bandwidth is also promised, exceeding clock speeds offered previously on the Cypress based GPUs. Many of the features first introduced on the Barts architecture will also be carried forward such as Morphological AA and enhanced tessellation performance. AMD's HD6950, which we will be looking at today, promises to be a good card worthy of replacing the old stallion that was the HD5870.



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