radeon

AMD will release its Radeon HD 7700 series graphics cards sometime in the next week. The new "Cape Verde" GPU aims to increase AMD's competitive edge in the sub-$200 market. This new design appears to focus more on a smaller number of better-configured Graphics Core Next stream processors being paired with higher clock speeds to further improve performance over the previous generation. AMD is counting on these changes to offer better performance while keeping transistor counts and therefore power consumption in check.

Rumors regarding Nvidia’s next-gen graphics cards, code named Kepler, keep on arriving at a frantic pace, the latest of these claiming that the solutions based on the GK104 GPU will be priced at $299 (about 230 EUR).

The $299 price tag was suggested by SemiAccurate, which apparently learned about it from various Nvidia AIB partners.

This month-end, AMD will launch the second product in its high-end Radeon HD 7900 series, the HD 7950, which is based on the same "Tahiti" silicon as the HD 7970, but with a few components disabled. Reliable sources revealed to DonanimHaber the reference clock speeds of the HD 7950. The core of the HD 7950 will be clocked at 800 MHz, and the memory at 1250 MHz (actual), 5.00 GHz (GDDR5 effective). This, compared to the 925 MHz (core), 1375 MHz (memory actual)/ 5.50 GHz (memory effective) clock speeds of the HD 7970.