14 DAY TRIAL // Rumors regarding AMD's plans to release a new midrange graphics card have been circulating around the Web ever since CeBIT, and now it seems like the Radeon HD 6790 has finally received a firm launch date as a report suggests that the Sunnyvale-based company will debut the card on March 31.
According to Donanim Haber, this card was built in order to take on Nvidia's GTX 550 Ti that was made official less than two weeks ago, on March 15.
Further details, however, are in short supply at this point, but ComputerBase suggests that the card could be based on the Barts core used for the Radeon HD 6850 and HD 6870 with some minor modifications that would limit its performance.
This could mean that the HD 6790 packs about 800 stream processors and that its operating frequencies are reduced to come under the 775MHz core and 1GHz (4GHz effective) memory clocks used by the HD 6850.
Some of the most important modifications brought by the Barts GPU to the Cypress architecture include improved tessellation performance, dual ultra-threaded dispatch processors as well as better rasterization performance.
The GeForce GTX 550 Ti, the GPU that AMD's upcoming creation is designed to compete with, is based on the GF116-400 core which packs 192 CUDA cores, 32 texturing units, 24 ROP units and a 192-bit wide memory bus.
Its GPU clock is set at 900MHz while the 1GB of GDDR5 memory runs at 4,100MHz, and performances place it right between the GTS 450 and GTX 460 768MB, which makes it about 7% faster than the Radeon HD 5770.
The price of the Radeon HD 6970 is expected to be set at $130, right between the $114.99 Radeon HD 5770 and the $169.99 Radeon HD 6850, so AMD's solution could be $20 cheaper than the GTX 550 Ti.