14 DAY TRIAL // Sapphire has announced the launch of a graphics card that is powered by the Advanced Micro Devices built Radeon HD 2900 Pro graphics processing unit but which comes with 1GB of dedicated video memory that works at a higher clock speed than previous models. Based on the 80 nanometer fabrication process the Radeon HD 2900 Pro comes with no less than 700 million transistors while using a unified superscalar shader architecture and being DirectX 10 compliant.
The Sapphire made graphics card comes with no less than 320 programmable shader processing units and thus it can be easily considered a high end product even if it only uses a pretty slow clock speed of 600MHz, just like the 512MB version.
While the Sapphire Radeon HD 2900 Pro graphics card that comes with 512MB of dedicated video memory uses a clock speed of 1600MHz, this new product comes with a speed boost of 250Mhz, resulting in a blazing speed of 1850Mhz that is even faster than the Radeon HD 2900 XT graphics card that normally comes with its video memory modules clocked at 1650MHz.
The faster and bigger DDR4 video memory from this new Sapphire graphics card should result in a performance boost over the level of the previous 512MB model especially since it is backed up by the presence of a wide 512-bit memory ring bus, but the relatively slow graphics processing unit might prove a little under clocked for the latest 3D games and applications.
According to the news site fudzilla, the Sapphire Radeon HD 2900 Pro may very well be made of Radeon HD 2900 XT based cards that had problems maintaining or running in a stable manner at a higher clock speed in which case overclocking could be a neat way of unlocking some additional performance at no expense. This new card from Sapphire comes equipped with a PCI Express x16 system interface and of course it is CrossFire ready and Microsoft Windows Vista certified.