14 DAY TRIAL // Advanced Micro Devices has been selling its desktop-aimed Radeon HD 6900 cards for some time now, and it seems it is ready to start offering cheaper versions with less memory.
While the Radeon HD 6800 cards were designed for the higher half of the mainstream market, the HD 6900 was made for the high-end.
Simply put, the HD 6900 line is composed of two models, at least for now, those being the HD 6970 and HD 6950.
Their formal introduction on the market was made around the middle of December, 2010, after which AMD's various partners unleashed their own versions.
Both models were alike in more than one respect, one of them being their memory, namely 2 GB of GDDR5 VRAM.
Since the VRAM always has a great bearing on the price of such devices, the Sunnyvale, California-based outfit has supposedly chosen to deliver new iterations of both HD 6900 members.
Simply put, according to HT4U, there will be both an HD 6970 and an HD 6950 with 'just' 1 GB of such memory.
Enthusiasts looking for a cheaper but still very powerful video board with support for DirectX 11 graphics shall no doubt be quite intrigued at the news.
So far, no other difference between the newcomers and the original versions has been implied, so the clock speeds, stream processors and feature support should be the same.
For those that want a reminder, the 6970 has the Cayman GPU clocked at 880 MHz, 1536 stream processors and an interface of 256 bits, while the other board has a clock speed of 800 MHz, 1,408 SPs and the same memory bandwidth.
The report did not say exactly when an actual press release comes out, but it should not take overly long.
Either way, once it is made, AMD's partners will no doubt deliver custom boards, Sapphire having been already revealed to be among the first to do so.