14 DAY TRIAL // AMD's new video cards, or at least the Radeon HD 6970, did not manage to actually match the performance of NVIDIA's GeFrce GTX 580, but their price/performance ratio remains good enough that they can be seen as having a strong position on the market. As consumers no doubt know by now, the AMD Radeon HD 6970 and HD 6950 have been officially introduced, along with various custom models from partner hardware makers.
Since NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 580 came out a while ago, part of the consumer base was no doubt rooting for AMD to match, if not exceed its performance.
This did not happen, but Advanced Micro Devices did seem to make up for it by delivering a good price.
Still, reviews (TechSpot, TechRadar, bit-tech) were mostly mixed, though the general consensus was that the card was generally better than NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 570, but not really near the might of the GTX 580.
AMD's card seemed to exceed the GTX 570 in benchmarking tests on average, but not by overly much, and the latter already has a smaller price tag than the former ($349 vs. $369).
If NVIDIA decreases the price of the second greatest GeForce GTX 500 series card in the near future, it is not altogether clear what will happen in terms of sales.
AMD did, of course, point out that the new architecture used in the Cayman will allow for a 10% performance improvement/mm2.
It should also be noted that the Cayman graphics processing unit can automatically adjust the GPU power draw by controlling clock speeds, thanks to the PowerTune technology.
Meanwhile, the Radeon HD 6950 does nto exactly have any sort of opposition and, considering that it is just a tad bit slower than its bigger sibling, it might actually end up selling better.