14 DAY TRIAL // While the HD 6870 and HD 6850 have already made their official appearance, the HD 6970 is still on its way, and there seems to be little information on it, save for what a few recent rumors can offer.
The existing Radeon HD 6000 series adapters are already battling the GeForce GTX 460 from NVIDIA on the mainstream market.
While this happens, their maker is preparing to take the battle to the higher level as well, by engaging even the GTX 470 and 480.
The means to achieve this is, of course, a new high-end graphics card, one that will be called Radeon HD 6970.
Unlike the HD 5970, this board won't be a dual-GPU model, being based around a single Cayman graphics core.
Unfortunately, almost nothing is known in terms of specifications, at least nothing in regards to what clock speeds one can expect it to possess.
Still, even with the scarcity of details, Fudzilla claims to have at least uncovered that the newcomer will have 2 GB of GDDR5 VRAM at its disposal. This memory will run on an interface of 256 bits.
It should probably be noted that, while the card may overcome the GeForce GTX 480, it is unclear how it will fare against the GTX 580 that NVIDIA has been working on.
The Fermi board will use 'just' 1.5 GB of VRAM but its interface will be of 384 bits and it is uncertain whether existing and upcoming games will even need more memory than 1.5 GB, or even that much.
Regardless, from a marketing standpoint, it will help AMD's image to be able to match or even outmatch NVIDIA's upcoming GF110-based card.
Granted, all that Fudzilla's report says is that the 6970 is close in performance to the GTX 580, though this can mean it's either slightly better or slightly slower.
The official announcement of the Radeon HD 6970 is set for the week of November 22, but samples should start to ship even sooner.