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You should have no trouble getting your game on this holiday shopping season. Let's recap your latest options. OnLive just launched its Micro Game console for $99, Nvidia recently outed its GeForce GTX 570 GPU, and according to DigiTimes, AMD is preparing to launch its new Radeon HD 6970 and HD 6950 graphics cards (Cayman) in the third week of December.
Citing un-named sources, DigiTimes says AMD's HD 6970 isn't quite up to par with Nvidia's GTX 580 videocard, so you can figure AMD's part to cost around $50 to $70 less. Previous rumors suggest this flagship part will come with 2GB of memory on a 256-bit bus chugging along at 1375MHz, 96 texture units, 32 ROPs, and a core clockspeed of 880MHz.
How many of these cards will actually be available in December remains to be seen. There's already talk that initial shipment volumes will be limited, so if you're holding out for one of these parts, get your trigger finger ready starting December 15th.
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Thiazolium
December 09, 2010 at 2:45pm
"True" Cayman is, unfortunately, an incomplete project. Originally slated to work on a 32nm process, AMD had to rearrange features on the chip to work with the 40nm process. What that entailed was borrowing some 58xx features and removing some of the originally intended "Southern Islands" features. In the end you end up with a compromised chip. GPU designs take 2-3 years to develop based on a promised manufacturing process. If the foundry can't deliver, the fabless company needs to redesign the chip in order to shrink the now oversized die to one that can actually be made. This means sacrificing the original design somewhat.
"Catch-up" isn't accurate at all. While Cayman has yet to surface, we have read that the architecture is much more advanced than previous generations. In other words, it's not a 58xx series refresh. On the contrary, it features things like equal capability processing units, new render backends, adaptive tessellation, asynchronous dispatch, faster double precision, dual graphics engines etc. etc. etc. Hardly catch up.
JohnP
December 09, 2010 at 12:09pm
AMD/ATI has good some great products over the years. a Couple times, they whooped Intel and NVidia to the punch and actually had better products. Yet, within a year, the competition comes in and crusies past. Then they are stuck playing catchup, always slightly behind the curve, so they have to eat profits and drop prices. Their R&D labs need a kick in the pants- it's a tough world out there.
