The latest video cards have been launched by AMD. These include the Radeon 6970 and the Radeon 6950. The Radeon 6970 has 1536 unified shaders, 96 texture units, 32 Render Output Units (ROP), and a core clock of 880 MHz. It comes with 2 GB of GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit memory bus running at 1.375 GHz. This gives it a memory bandwidth of 176 GB/sec. The pixel fill rate is 28.2 Gigapixels/sec, and the texture fillrate is 70.4 Gigatexels/sec. The 6970 consumes 250 Watts of power at load, and 20 Watts at idle.

The Radeon 6950 has 1408 unified shaders, 88 texture units, 32 Render Output Units (ROP), and a core clock of 800 MHz. It comes with 2 GB of GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit memory bus running at 1.25 GHz. The 6950 consumes 200 Watts of power at load, and 20 Watts at idle.

Both graphics cards comes with two DVI ports, two mini-DisplayPorts, and one HDMI 1.4 port. One of the DVI ports is a single link port. That means that you cannot drive two 2560×1600 monitors using the DVI ports. Both have 2.64 Billion transistors and are manufactured on TSMC’s 40 nm process.

What about performance? The Radeon 6970 performs similarly to a NVIDIA GTX 570 or GTX 480. That means it is not the fastest graphics card. That title is still held by the GTX 580. The Radeon 6950 performs slightly better than a NVIDIA GTX 470 and slightly worse than a NVIDIA GTX 570. The 6970 will cost $379, while the 6950 will cost $299.

One interesting feature on the new graphics cards is a new switch near the CrossFire connectors. These graphics cards come with two BIOSes. Should you flash the card with a BIOS and it goes horribly wrong, you can then literally flip this switch, boot off the good BIOS, and recover nicely.

via : AMD’s Radeon HD 6970 & Radeon HD 6950: Paving The Future For AMD @ Anandtech