14 DAY TRIAL // With the Radeon HD 7970 now official, enthusiast’s attention has now turned towards the soon to be released HD 7950, which is going to feature the same Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture as its older brother but at a lower price point.
At the heart of the Radeon HD 7950 will stand the same Tahiti-class GPU as that found in the HD 7970, but this time some of the core’s Compute Units will be disabled to turn it into the Tahiti Pro.
According to a slide published by Donanim Haber, the number of CUs disabled is set at four, which means that the card will include a total of 1792 stream processors compared to the 2048 of the HD 7970.
These will be accompanied by 112 texture units, while the memory bus width, and most probably the number of ROP units, has remained unchanged.
The amount of memory installed also wasn’t modified so we are talking about the same 3GB of GDDR5 video buffer that is designed to run at 5Gbps data rate.
AMD hasn’t so far established the final frequency of the VRAM or that of the GPU, but the latter is expected to come clocked somewhere in between 800MHz and 900MHz.
The power consumption figures of the graphics card are now yet available, but this will feature the same ZeroCore technology as the HD 7970 that can completely turns off the card when the system is in idle with the monitor shut down.
Other features include support for one DVI, one HDMI and two mini-DisplayPort video outputs as well as PCI Express 3.0 and DirectX 11.1 compatibility.
Sadly, no information regarding the price of the Radeon HD 7950 is available at this time, but we expect this to retail for about $500 (384 EUR), which is just about how much Nvidia asks for its GTX 580. Availability seems to be scheduled for January 2012.
