The battle for frame rate supremacy is always fun to watch, as AMD and Nvidia joust for top position with multi-million dollar R&D budgets. While the ultra high end cards generate only a small percentage of sales for either company, the performance leader will often generate sales lower down the chain. That is how the enthusiast ‘state of mind' works.
There is no doubting that Nvidia's GTX580 is one of the finest graphics cards money can buy – we use them at KitGuru regularly for gaming and folding@home. However, equally so, AMD followers are proud to say that the HD5970 is still the fastest graphics card on the market.
Well that is until today, as AMD have just released the replacement – The Antilles HD6990.
The AMD HD6990 is a monster video card, it features 4 GB of GDDR5 memory on a 256 bit memory interface with 3072 stream processors and 192 texture units. We will find out today if it is the new performance leader.
AMD HD6990 | |
Compute Power | 5.1 TFLOPs (IEEE754-SP) 1.27 TFLOPs (IEEE754-DP) |
Core Clock Speed | 830mhz |
Primitive Rate | 2 prim/clk |
Shader Architecture | VLIW4 |
Stream Processors | 3072 ALU |
Texture Units | 192 |
ROPs/Z-Stencil | 64/256 |
Frame Buffer | 4GB GDDR5 |
Memory Width/Speed | 256-bit, 5.0 Gbps |
Load Board Power | <375W |
Power Connectors | 8 pin & 8 Pin |
Display Outputs | 1xDVI + 4 mDP |