Things are certainly heating up, and even after AMD has shown off some truly amazing value for money cards that challenge Nvidia’s performance mainstream market, no real competition has emerged for the Nvidia GeForce GTX 480. All that of course will change when the HD 6900 series gets released. Apparently the HD 6970 will provide a 20% performance upgrade over the HD 5870, it’s previous flaghsip single-GPU. If true, the HD 6970 will definitely be able to take on the GTX 480, however, on the other side of the pie, is the claim that Nvidia’s rumoured GeForce GTX 580 will offer 20% performance upgrade over the GTX 480. This again puts things in Nvidia’s court…. Guess the HD 6990 will take care of that?
Nvidia GeForce GTX 580
Rumours of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 seems to be solidifying, with a new leak apparently containing images of the Fermi-based GF110 graphics card. While nothing from the images show that this card is an high-end one, it certainly looks different from recent cards made by Nvidia or its partners.
Not much can be seen about the card’s endowments, but the lack of outputs indicates that Eyefinity like multi-screen surround technology will not be integrated. Also, the cooling system seems too large but not too complex, indicating a rather modest (for a top-end Fermi card) power consumption and heat generation.
AMD Radeon HD 6970
Solid speculation and more than a few leaks has led one to the conclusion that the Cayman Pro GPU will be HD 6950, the Cayman XT GPU the HD 6970, and Antilles (dual Cayman XT) will be the HD 6990. For now, not much information is available about any of these cards. Further speculation has it that the HD 6970 will be much more than just a tweaked HD 5870, but instead it will have some major differences, as well as much lower power consumption, but maybe, a higher temperature. Now, there’s also been an unverified benchmark leaked of the HD 6970’s performance, which is seen below:
