AMD HD 7950 Launch Date Reportedly in Limbo

Posted 12/30/2011 at 10:19am | by Paul Lilly

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Every PC gamer who doesn't have an aversion to AMD would love to own a dual-GPU Radeon HD 7990 when it ships in March 2012, but not everyone can afford (or justify) an $849 investment on a graphics card. By that same token, $549 for a Radeon HD 7970 is also beyond some people's budgets, which is why AMD will also release a Radeon HD 7950 based on its Tahiti Pro chipset. Two questions come to mind: How much and when will it launch?

Unfortunately, we're still waiting on answers to both. We can speculate that the HD 7950 will be priced in the neighborhood of $400, which will still be out of reach of some gamers' budgets, but certainly more affordable than the HD 7990. A bigger question mark is its release.

According to Fudzilla, the scheduled January 9, 2011 release date is shaping up to be a paper launch, and "there is no way that this one will be available" for purchase on that day. Some major players in the add-in board (AIB) business tell Fudzilla the 7950 will still launch on January 9th, and you'll probably see reviews pop up on the Web, but those review samples will be coming directly from AMD.

Based on leaked info, the HD 7950 will sport 1,792 stream processors, 28 compute units, 112 texture units, 32 full color ROPs, and 3GB of GDDR5 on a 384-bit memory bus, and support up to six displays.  Clockspeeds and power draw are still unknown.