14 DAY TRIAL // It would appear that the long-awaited moment when Advanced Micro Devices unleashes its most powerful graphics adapter yet is not far off, as the official press photos of the card have been released.
AMD and NVIDIA have been involved in a fairly tight game of meet and raise the stakes on the graphics cards market.
The latter fully caught up to AMD in 2010 and then proceeded to trump its boards with stronger ones, even faster releases.
Still, the Sunnyvale, California-based CPU and GPU maker has had a trump card, that being the dual-GPU DirectX 11 video controller Radeon HD 5970.
Now, the same outfit has proven to be quite near to officially launching the successor to that particular model.
The graphics card in question is known as Radeon HD 6990, utilizes two graphics processors and has the codename Antilles.
It should, among other things, prove that video boards have a place on the market alongside Fusion APUs (CPUs which also have DirectX 11 but much lower graphics rendering capabilities).
The clock speeds have not been mentioned yet, although they will probably not be as high as they could be because of power and, perhaps, heat constraints.
That said, the memory amount, at least, was made clear. It is a massive capacity of 4 GB GDDR5 which operates on a 2 x 256-bit memory interface.
What's more, AMD threw in 3,027 Stream Processors and enough display connectors to make sure that all things required for Eyefinity multi-monitor setups is present.
To be more specific, the list of video outputs includes four mini DisplayPort connectors and one DVI.
The formal release of Antilles should be made in March, at which point enthusiasts will be able to truly turn their systems up to eleven, even set up multi-card configurations via CrossFireX. What remains to be seen is how long it takes for NVIDIA to supply its own dual-chip GTX card.
