14 DAY TRIAL // Since Sapphire is quite a traditional ATI/AMD partner, it was to be expected for the company to also join in on the Radeon HD 6970/6950 launch fray, although, sadly, we can't say that their graphics cards offer much of a surprise, when compared to AMD's reference version, of course.
So, similar to the other Radeons released today, the new SAPPHIRE HD 6970 uses a new GPU architecture from AMD which features dual graphics engines in one chip with 24 SIMD engines and a total of 1536 stream processors with 96 texture units, providing massively parallel computing power for graphics and other accelerated applications.
Its core clock speed of 880MHz, together with a dedicated high speed interface to 2GB of GDDR5 memory running at 1375MHz (5.5Gb/s effective) delivers the highest performance in this series, while the new Tesselation engines bring up to three times the performance of the previous generation, and new Enhanced Quality AA and filtering modes bring the highest image quality ever achieved.
At the same time, SAPPHIRE will introduce the SAPPHIRE HD 6950, with the slightly less powerful configuration of 1408 stream processors and 88 texture processing units.
With its clock speeds of 800MHz for the core and 1250Mhz (5 Gb/sec effective) for the memory this model brings users a “new benchmark in performance” at a lower price point with full DirectX 11 support and all the features of this new generation of technology.
However, beside these two rather standard boards, SAPPHIRE also released the HD 6970 Gaming Edition, which will come with a voucher for users to download the full Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Vietnam game as soon as it is available on December 21st.
An additional SAPPHIRE HD 6970 Limited Edition will feature the card and game voucher delivered in a special Aluminium carry case.
It's interesting to note that, Sapphire's Radeons HD 6900 series graphics cards are among the most affordable out there, the basic model selling for 289 pounds sterling, which is a bit less than AMD's MSRP, while the Gaming Edition sells for 299 pounds sterling and the Limited Edition for around 320 pounds sterling.
