Introduction

In October 2010, AMD released their Radeon HD 6850 and HD 6870 which are based on the Barts GPU core. Today AMD adds a third Barts-based model to their lineup in form of the Radeon HD 6790.

HD 6790 comes with an odd model number that we haven't seen from AMD before. It basically means "the fastest midrange card. In terms of performance we can expect significantly reduced performance compared to the HD 6870 and HD 6850, which have 1120 and 960 shaders - AMD's Radeon HD 6790 comes with 800. Compared to the HD 5770 performance should be increased by higher clocks and architectural improvements over Juniper. Price-wise AMD is communicating around $150 for their new Radeon HD 6790 which seems to match with what we have seen on some early postings of online merchants.