14 DAY TRIAL // Slated for an April 19 release, AMD's upcoming Radeon HD 6670 and HD 6650 graphics cards, based on the Turks GPU, have already been benchmarked and the first results seem to indicated that both cards are faster than Nvidia's GeForce GT 440 GPU.
Turks is the latest addition brought by AMD to its line of GPUs and is based on the 6000-series architecture which adds improved tessellation performance, more functional units as well as the UVD3 media acceleration engine.
As far as their specifications are concerned, both graphics cards are surprisingly similar and pack 480 stream processing units, 24 texturing units, 32 Z/Stencil ROP units, 8 color ROP units, as well as a 128-bit memory interface which can be connected to 512MB or 1GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 1000MHz (4GHz data rate).
The operating frequency is the only thing that varies between the two graphics solutions, since the GPU of the Radeon HD 6670 works at 800MHz, while its smaller brother has its core frequency set at 650MHz.
Although the cards are supposed to launch on April 19, the Donanim Haber publication has somehow managed to get its hands on some samples of the card and run a series of tests to see how they perform against the Nvidia GT 440.
The cards were benchmarked in 3DMark Vantage as well as in 3DMark 11, and both AMD solutions managed to come on top of their Nvidia counterpart.
The biggest performance difference was witnessed in 3DMark 11, Extreme mode, where the HD 6670 proved to be about 44% faster than the GT 440.
AMD's board partners will release a wide selection of graphics cards based on the Radeon HD 6670 and 6570 GPUs, including passive and factory overclocked models, and their retail price is expected to hover between $70 and $80 US.
