Back in January we told of the upcoming release of the AMD Radeon HD 6990 graphics card, a dual-GPU due for release in the first quarter of this year. The dual-core graphics card was briefly displayed to people at an Asia Pacific Fusion Tech Day by AMD’s GPU general manager, Matt Skynner.
Now it seems a real rival to the Radeon HD 6990 will be NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 590, said to be coming in the middle of March, so both will be released in competition with each other. We reckon these two will really be fighting it out to take spot in the high-end graphics market and although specs for both are still pretty hard to come by, we do have information about rumored specs to take a look at although of course we’ll need to hear much more before deciding which might dominate.
For the Radeon HD 6990, formerly known as Antilles, which we previously described as a real whopper, specs that have been rumored so far are two HD 6970 GPU’s on one PCB along with 4GB GDDR5 memory. It’s also thought that it will have one dual-link DVI port and 3 mini DisplayPort connectors. Other details include fully-loaded power consumption of 300W or 30W on idle. Updated information from Hardware Canucks however tells us that there will in fact be 4 DisplayPort connectors.
Meanwhile Vlad Savov, over on Engadget, sourced from Donanim Haber and Hexus, gives some anticipated specs for the dual-GPU NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590, now rumored for an unveiling at PAX East 2011. These include 1024 total CUDA cores and 3GB of onboard RAM. It’s also speculated that there will be dual 384-bit memory controllers along with 3 DVI outputs to enable single-card 3D Vision Surround gaming. Of course ultimately it will all come down to speeds and we’ve heard nothing about that yet for either graphics cards, but what we can be sure of is that these two will be battling it out to be top dog.
It’s going to be an intriguing slog and getting the coveted top slot will be extremely important to both AMD and NVIDIA. As we’re expecting to hear full announcements soon about both of these we don’t have long to wait to find out more, but which do you think will dominate? Let us know with your comments.