The second card powered by the Tahiti GPU makes its formal appearance

Jan 31, 2012 07:09 GMT  ·  By

January 31, 2012 is finally here, so Advanced Micro Devices stepped up and made the genuine introduction of the second board from its Radeon HD 7000 series.

The Radeon HD 7950 graphics adapter is powered by the same graphics processing unit as the HD 7970 (the GPU codename is Tahiti).

Based on the 28nm manufacturing process technology, it is the latest and second greatest accomplishment, of the Sunnyvale, California-based company, on the video market.

The specifications are the ones that rumors, reports and early listings clearly spelled out a while ago.

With the GPU operating at 800 MHz, the memory, 3 GB of GDDR5 VRAM, has a clock speed of 5 GHz.

That said, the board features two mini DisplayPort outputs, a DVI connector and, as is common at this point, an HDMI output as well.

Moving on, the hardware developer implemented AMD Graphics Core Next Architecture and the AMD PowerTune and AMD ZeroCore Power technologies.

What's more, HD 7950 supports the PCI Express Gen 3.0 interface and, naturally, CrossFire technology and HD3D as well.

All in all, AMD's card can achieve 2.8 TFLOPs of compute power and up to twice the base performance in dual-GPU configurations.

“With the arrival of the AMD Radeon HD 7950, AMD has set the bar exceedingly high for 28nm graphics technology and performance,” said Matt Skynner, corporate vice president and general manager, GPU Division, AMD.

“From the wraparound immersion made possible by AMD Eyefinity multi-display technology and the AMD HD3D technology stereo 3D experience, to the incredible realism of today's DirectX 11 capable games, we're delivering an unrivaled experience for gamers. The AMD Radeon HD 7900 series products are in a class of their own.”

Naturally, with this release out of the way, AMD's various partners are revealing their own models, both custom-designed and not. Stay tuned for more.

The official price is $450, but Newegg listings start at $459. The European price should be around 420 Euro.