The chip features two “front-end” graphics engines, with two thread dispatch processors, two geometry tessellation units, and two vertex processing engines. The architecture of the Cayman GPU is fairly new, with quite a few changes from that of the Radeon HD 5000 series and Radeon HD 6800 series. Note that the Radeon HD 69 feature 2GB of RAM, a step up from the 1GB we usually see on AMD cards the extra RAM will help in intensive games running at high resolution. It features a lot of texturing power and high clock speeds, but fewer render back-ends than Nvidia’s cards have. Nevertheless, they offer good power efficiency for their class, as well as lots of other interesting features.Īt almost 400 square millimeters, the GPU powering AMD’s new graphics cards is the largest the company has produced in a long time, but it’s still about 26 percent smaller than the GPU in Nvidia’s latest cards.

Both the Radeon HD 6970 and the Radeon HD 6950 are quite long, too, and won’t fit in smaller PCs (as is often the case with high-end enthusiast cards). Anyone hoping that AMD would reclaim the absolute speed crown from Nvidia will be disappointed. The Radeon HD 6900 series cards are certainly fast, though the 6970 doesn’t always fare better than the Nvidia GeForce GTX 570 against which it is priced to compete. AMD has redesigned the shader units for improved efficiency, greatly enhanced geometry performance, and employed a whole new power-management system. Code-named Cayman, this new GPU doesn’t merely take the architecture of the Radeon HD 6800 series and scale it up rather, it makes significant architectural changes. Instead of its usual tactic of addressing the higher end of the market with a graphics card containing two of the GPUs powering the Radeon HD 6870 (a chip code-named Barts), it is using a single, larger, more-powerful new GPU. AMD is trying something new with its Radeon HD 6900 series of graphics cards.

Amd radeon hd 6700 series review