Hardware AMD Radeon 6950 1GB Details Leak

An over-eager board partner has confirmed the AMD Radeon 6950 1GB ahead of its official launch.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2011/01/18/radeon-6950-1gb-leak/1

 

need to wait for performance figures, but I think that the power of such cards is overkill for smaller monitors and for bigger monitors the extra RAM will boost performance.

 

Still wont tempt me away from the new 560.....after 5yrs, i've had enough of ATI's 'quirky' drivers.......and really just fancy going back to Nvidia for the first time since my old 6800GT....

 

Why?

Nvidia have already shown with the 580 and 570 that less than 2gb holds back these cards. Yea you'll get very high frames at low res but as soon as you apply AA and textures your frames will fall off a cliff. Worse case you'll have a fast game that looks ugly.

 

Is there any benefit at all for dropping the Ram to 1GB, other than cost?

 

Wrong.....with the exception of GTA4, you can max out any game out there with loads of AA, as long as you game at less than 1680x1050....with 1GB of Ram.

 

What's the reckoning that they've taken the opportunity to start lopping off the extra cores so that they don't unlock to 6970's?

 

Power drain. Less memory, less power needed from PSU and less heat transfered to PCB.

All that scaremongering about memory. If you are superhuman with eyes capable of spotting over 30FPS then even quad GTX 580 won't be enough for you. But for overwhelming majority of gamers 1 GB is plenty. All you need is stable 40 FPS, to enjoy ANY game. I do have only one game which stutters [@2048x1152] on my ancient 8800 gts 640: X3:Terran Conflict with a lot, lot, lot of factories and ships in the system. Other than this I have no issues with only 640MB of VRAM, but I waiting for GTX 560 in breathless anticipation. I want to switch to SLI 560 or 570, just need some figures. Only 7-8 days to go for 560. Bring it on, I want to spend some money. Once every decade I can do that with VGA. LOL

 

and today, who here still runs anything below 1920x1080?

it's just a move to combat gtx560, nothing to be surprised about. 1GB makes sense for those on a budget, similar group of people who also bought gtx460 768MB, some of those group of people even went SLi with only 768MB of memory, and claiming it can beat gtx580.

 

Hakuren

Is that why the 768mb GTX 460 was the preferred choice for folding and not the 1GB version?

 

1680x1080 for me have no reason to go bigger my old sammy 206bw does it for me. so yes there are plenty of people who still game at below that resolution.

 

Um....<puts hand up>

 

Considering the average PC specs that are released through steam I thin you'll still find that anything above 1680x1050 is by far in the minority. I agree that a higher percentage of those who have monitors with higher resolutions will be found in the forums of websites such as Bit-Tech but never under estimate those who hang on to older hardware, especially monitors.

 

Yeah, but if you were doing that why would you want a 6950? A GTX 460, 6850 or 6870 can do the same.

 

Preemptive strike on the GTX 560 price point and to remove the extra cores that allow bios flash to HD 6970. Also there are rumors of a HD 6970 1GB model in the works but no confirmation yet.

Hd 6950 is a solid performer and the 1GB model will have a slight drop off in performance at 2560 x 1600 but AMD wants to lower prices so gamers buy HD 6950 CF set-ups instead of GTX 560 SLI. A HD 6950 1gb CF set-up would cost $500 and out class a GTX 580 which is $500 by a very large margin in all benchmarks, Far Cry 2 and Unigine Heaven 2.0 included sure no Physx but your not missing much there.

Step your game up to 1920 x 1080 so then you won't need 8x AA as 4xAA will do. Please Stop with all the "I can run any game on my 8800 GTS" it's time to wake up and smell the DX11. Death to DX9!!!

 

To gate crash the 560's price point presumably. If the 1GB 6950 has better performance than a 560 and a similar price point, it would probably force prices down on the 6850/6870 and below.

Will be interesting to compare the performance at 1920 x 1080 of this card and the 560.

*edit* according to rage 3d the suggested launch price is $279, so probably about £200 in the UK.

 

No mate. It's because Folding relies alot more on the speed of the chip rather than bandwith or the amount of memory. A 1gb will preform nearly the exact same as the 768mb one.
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2010/08/05/what-is-the-best-graphics-card-for-folding/3
Look at the two 460's about 1/3 of the way down.

 

I must be superhuman then I can definitely tell the difference.

 

Nope, memory is not necessary (in such large amounts) for folding and so the 768MB one is used more by the virtue of being cheaper.

 

You can see in excess of 100fps(much more). I consider 30fps unplayable. Yes I consider console games unplayable.
The eye doesn't see relative to frame rate anyway. You see the difference in frames, which is dependent on speed on objects being displayed.