Sapphire Officially Enters AMD Radeon HD 6790 Contest

Sapphire may have been the one behind the first leaked photos of the newest video card from Advanced Micro Devices, but it really looks like they are ready to get to business for real now that their actual press release has come out.

The Radeon HD 6790, though it has already been customized by some companies, has only just now been formally launched by Advanced Micro Devices.

Still, even before the likes of HIS and PowerColor jumped the gun, Sapphire was the first to actually provide the web, albeit unwillingly, with some photos of its own version.

Now, Sapphire has finally gotten around to actually releasing the card, having issued the press release not too long ago.

The card seems to be stock-clocked but this should be more than enough to handle any game that users might want to throw at it.

After all, the support for DirectX 11 and the amount of VRAM, plus the Stream Processors and the clock speeds, while mainstream-level, are still more than enough, what with high-end boards being more focused on overclockability and running graphically-intensive tasks at top-most resolutions, especially on multiple displays at once.

That said, there are 800 of those stream processors, as well as 16 ROPs, 1 GB of GDDR5 VRAM and 40 texture units.

The GPU (Barts LE) works at a frequency of 840 MHz, which is unchanged from that of the original, while the memory has a clock speed of 4,200 MHz.

Needless to say, like all other 6000 series adapters, DirectX 11 is fully supported, to which is added support for stereoscopic 3D, the hardware UVD (Unified Video Decoder) and Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio.

What's more, the Eyefinity technology allows for the image to be spread over three display at once, something useful for both immersive gaming (provided the monitor bezel is thin enough) and for productivity in business applications.