14 DAY TRIAL // After all sort of rumors and leaks made their way onto the web, AMD's Cayman graphics core has finally been made official, board partners everywhere rushing to deliver their own solutions based on the Radeon HD 6900 architecture, XFX being among the first to release such cards.
As it is usually the case with top of the line graphics cards, both of these boards are based on AMD's reference design for the HD 6900 series, XFX just adding a sticker with their name on the card's shroud.
Furthermore, the cards come with the stock clocks, the Radeon HD 6970 core and memory running at 880MHz and 5500MHz, respectively, while the HD 6950 is clocked at 800MHz/5000MHz.
Since both the HD 6970 and the HD 6950 are based on the Cayman core, the memory interface is 256-bit wide, AMD opting for 2GB of GDDR5 memory to be installed on all HD 6900 series offerings.
As you probably know by now, only the HD 6970 is based on the full Cayman GPU which features 1536 stream processors, 96 texturing units and 32 ROPs, its smaller brother having to make do with “just” 1408 such units, the shader count being also reduced to 88.
However, both cards feature the new VLIW4 design that AMD introduced in the Cayman architecture as well as dual graphics engines, meaning tessellation and rasterization power is doubled compared to the previous Barts core (at least in theory).
Unfortunately, XFX has not made public any details regarding pricing just yet, although a quick Google check revealed the company's HD 6970 is listed at $379.99, $10 more compared to AMD's original price.
As for the HD 6950, we weren't able to find it listed anywhere in the US, but AMD's recommended retail price for this GPU is set at $299.