AMD Releases ‘World’s Fastest’ Mobile GPU; the Radeon HD 6990M

AMD this week has launched what it touts as being the fastest-ever mobile graphics processor to be released; the Radeon HD 6990M. Don’t let the name fool you though, this isn’t a dual-GPU part as the name would imply, but rather it’s earned this top-tier name for likely being the final highest-end mobile part of this current-generation.

The first mainstream HD 6000 parts were released this past January, with the Barts-based HD 6950M and HD 6970M being the highest-end parts at the time. The HD 6990M supersedes both of those in performance, by offering more cores (1120 vs 960), a slightly faster core clock (715MHz on the HD 6990M vs. 680MHz on the HD 6970M) and… well, that’s it.

Compared to NVIDIA’s highest-end offering, the GeForce GTX 580M, AMD states that its HD 6990M is up to 25% faster at 1920×1080. In internal tests, Dragon Age 2 was found to be 23.69% faster, Aliens vs. Predator 13.19% faster, Quake Wars 25.82% faster, Just Cause 2 14.22% faster and Metro 2033 11.40% faster.

For even beefier performance, it’s noted that the HD 6990M is CrossFireX-compatible. That means that if a vendor wanted to throw a second one of them into a notebook, you’d get a serious performance boost. At the same time, you could also take advantage of combining the power of the HD 6990M with the GPU found inside of an APU, but I’m not quite sure I understand the benefits of that.

Pricing hasn’t been disclosed, but you can be sure the HD 6990M will carry a fair premium compared to the previous champion, the HD 6970M.