AMD’s Current Lineup
As a follow up to the Barts architecture, Cayman series cards will represent the upper end of AMD’s current refreshed lineup with only the Antilles dual GPU card left to complete the enthusiast product space. There will be additional entry level cards based off of the Turks and Caicos cores in the coming months as well but for the time being what you see is a top to bottom assault upon the $200 to $400 markets.
The HD 6970 is the current kingpin of AMD’s product stack with a massive amount of rendering potential even though it does feature less shaders and the same number of ROPs as the outgoing HD 5870. On the flip side, the Cayman products have the capacity for additional texture horsepower through the use of extra SIMD engines. One of the largest departures is the use a 2GB of ultra fast 5Ghz+ GDDR5 on these cards which allows them to push some incredible bandwidth numbers.
While the HD 6970 is officially geared as a competitor against the GTX 570 and EOL’d GTX 480 with a price of only $369, the HD 6950 2GB is currently slotted into a market that currently doesn’t really hold all that much competition. The GTX 470 does currently occupy the $250 to $275 price points but the Cayman Pro should outperform it and as such it naturally costs a bit more as well. In the coming weeks we should also see a 1GB version of this card that will be aimed at a slightly lower scale market.
From a cost standpoint, AMD’s new cards seem to hit the nail on the head when it comes to price versus performance. However, they are also up against some extremely tough competition with NVIDIA’s GTX 580 and GTX 570 drawing rave reviews for their new take on an existing architecture. One thing that should be apparent is that AMD’s original goal with Cayman seemed to be direct competition for the GTX 480 and GTX 470 but with delays came a brand new playing field.
AMD’s Current Lineup
As a follow up to the Barts architecture, Cayman series cards will represent the upper end of AMD’s current refreshed lineup with only the Antilles dual GPU card left to complete the enthusiast product space. There will be additional entry level cards based off of the Turks and Caicos cores in the coming months as well but for the time being what you see is a top to bottom assault upon the $200 to $400 markets.
The HD 6970 is the current kingpin of AMD’s product stack with a massive amount of rendering potential even though it does feature less shaders and the same number of ROPs as the outgoing HD 5870. On the flip side, the Cayman products have the capacity for additional texture horsepower through the use of extra SIMD engines. One of the largest departures is the use a 2GB of ultra fast 5Ghz+ GDDR5 on these cards which allows them to push some incredible bandwidth numbers.
While the HD 6970 is officially geared as a competitor against the GTX 570 and EOL’d GTX 480 with a price of only $369, the HD 6950 2GB is currently slotted into a market that currently doesn’t really hold all that much competition. The GTX 470 does currently occupy the $250 to $275 price points but the Cayman Pro should outperform it and as such it naturally costs a bit more as well. In the coming weeks we should also see a 1GB version of this card that will be aimed at a slightly lower scale market.
From a cost standpoint, AMD’s new cards seem to hit the nail on the head when it comes to price versus performance. However, they are also up against some extremely tough competition with NVIDIA’s GTX 580 and GTX 570 drawing rave reviews for their new take on an existing architecture. One thing that should be apparent is that AMD’s original goal with Cayman seemed to be direct competition for the GTX 480 and GTX 470 but with delays came a brand new playing field.
