Introduction

Today AMD has launched their new AMD Radeon HD 6900 Series. The new graphics cards are based on a reworked GPU core called "Cayman" that features a new shader design called VLIW4. Read our HD 6950 Review to get an idea about the architectural changes and find out how the single card performs. This review will investigate how two HD 6950 cards in CrossFire perform, whether HD 6950 CrossFire is a viable solution considering price/performance and to also shed some light on what to expect from a future AMD HD 6990.

With Cayman and the HD 6970, AMD is introducing its biggest design change for the GPU's SIMD processing area since Radeon HD 2900 series, it's also introducing a greater amount of parallelism to the graphics engine, and doubling the standard memory amount from 1 GB in the previous generation Radeon HD 5870 and Radeon HD 5850, to 2 GB on both Radeon HD 6970 and HD 6950. resulting in 4 GB of memory for the HD 6950 CrossFire setup reviewed here. As a brief lesson on AMD's naming scheme with this generation, Radeon HD 6950 and HD 6970 represent high-end single GPU SKUs, successors to HD 5800 series, while the recently introduced HD 6800 series are in a segment of their own with no definitive predecessors.