Radeon HD 6950 1GB and GTX 560 Ti Announced

Coming up to the end of the month, another wave of GPUs make their way onto the market. NVIDIA introduces it’s latest – more mainstream solution, the GTX 560 Ti, a model revision of the GTX 460 to take advantage of the matured 40nm manufacturing process, providing users with the GPU they expected over 6 months ago. Higher clock speeds and more Stream processors are the order of the day – all for $249.

Attempting to steal some of NVIDIA’s thunder, AMD has also introduced a minor revision of its 6950, offering 1GB of RAM instead of 2GB for $259. The 1GB version is pretty much identical to the 2GB version, from stream units, bus width and clock speeds, even the length of the card. The only difference is the switch from 2Gb modules to 1Gb modules. The reason for this seems a little strange, as the price difference between the two cards is a mere $20. In the long run, coughing up the extra $20 for another GB of ram would be the safer bet, but it all comes down to the price on the day.

Further on the offensive, the first few pre-overclocked 6870’s with custom coolers are making their way on to the market, aiming at the $229 price range – possibly to offer a cheaper alternative to the GTX 560 Ti, much like NVIDIA did with its FTW cards. There is also the latest AMD driver, 11.1a, to give a moderate boost in performance to most of the latest generation AMD GPUs as well as an overhaul to the UI.

Both the GTX 560 Ti and AMD 6950 1GB are in the lab being benched at this very moment with results published soon.