AMD today announced the launch of the AMD Radeon HD 6990, the next generation video card based on the Antilles DirectX 11 chipset and possibly the fastest video card on the market today. The cards are available immediately from retailers, with select models starting at US $699 MSRP.





Designed for the power gamer, AMD Radeon HD 6990 graphics cards include AMD's second-generation, Microsoft DirectX 11-capable architecture, advanced image quality features and AMD PowerTune intelligent technology to enable higher clock speeds.

The card natively supports for up to five displays using AMD Eyefinity multi-display technology, with six display support possible via DisplayPort 1.2 components available for purchase later this year.

The AMD Radeon HD 6990 graphics cards also feature a dual-BIOS toggle switch, allowing enthusiast gamers to unlock the card and rev up the clocks and voltages for even more performance. The card's default speed is set at 830 Mhz (5.10 TFLOPs Single Precision compute power, 1.27 TFLOPs Double Precision Compute Power) and it can be switched into Overdrive mode at a flick of a switch. The Overdrive mode is set at 880 Mhz (5.40 TFLOPs Single Precision compute power, 1.37 TFLOPs Double Precision Compute Power).





The card has also 4GB of GDDR5 memory onboard clocked at 1250MHz, 3072 Stream Processors, 192 Texture Units, 128 Z/Stencil ROP Units, 64 Color ROP Units, Dual geometry and dual rendering engines a 256-bit GDDR5 memory interface and PCI Express 2.1 x16 bus interface.



Here is a comparison among AMD's latest Radeon graphics cards:

	Radeon HD 6990	Radeon HD 6970	Radeon HD 6950	Radeon HD 5970	Radeon HD 5870	Radeon HD 5850
GPU	Antilles	Cayman	Cayman	Hemlock	Cypress	Cypress
Stream Processors	3,072	1,536	1,408	3,200	1,600	1,440
Texture Units	192	96	88	160	80	72
Color ROP Units	64	32	32	64	32	32
GPU clock (MHz)	830 (Up to 880 MHz oveclock)	880	800	725	850	725
Memory	GDDR5	GDDR5	GDDR5	GDDR5	GDDR5	GDDR5
Memory interface	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit
Memory (MB)	4,096	2,048	2,048	2,048	1,024	1,024
Gaming Power (W)	350	190	140	294	188	151
Idle Power (W)	37	20	20	42	27	27
Power connectors	8-pin+8-pin	8-pin+6-pin	6-pin+6-pin	8-pin+6-pin	6-pin+6-pin	6-pin+6-pin

Finally, AMD HD3D technology provides 3D gaming and movie experience, thanks to HDMI 1.4a support.





Features:

* New AMD PowerTune technology: Designed to perform real-time intelligent power management, AMD PowerTune technology on the AMD Radeon HD 6990 automatically enables higher clock speeds and faster performance in games.

* Increased memory for higher image quality: With 4GB of GDDR5 memory, gamers can enjoy gaming even on up to five simultaneous displays.

* AMD Radeon HD 6990 graphics processors also enable gaming in DirectX 9, DirectX 10, DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL titles in single card or multi-card AMD CrossFireX configurations.

* Advanced anti-aliasing features enable enhanced image quality for realistic gaming. Enhanced-Quality Anti-Aliasing (EQAA) uses a new sampling technique to help improve visual quality, while Morphological Anti-Aliasing (MLAA) uses DirectCompute acceleration to provide anti-aliasing on any DirectX 9, DirectX 10, or DirectX 11 application.

New to the AMD Radeon HD 6990 graphics processor is the ability to configure up to five monitors in portrait mode. The cards offer support for both DisplayPort 1.2 features and HDMI 1.4a, offering enthusiasts multi-monitor configuration options, flexibility in display selection, and new DisplayPort audio features.

AMD EyeSpeed Technology

AMD claims that the EyeSpeed visual acceleration technology will let users do more, faster: Tapping the power of the AMD Radeon HD 6990, enthusiasts will enjoy clearer and more vibrant videos, as well as improved performance and new features in top media, entertainment and productivity applications with AMD EyeSpeed technology.

Featuring support for IEEE 754 double precision floating point ops, the AMD Radeon HD 6990 is equipped to dominate computationally intense workloads.

AMD Radeon HD 6990 graphics cards also feature Unified Video Decoder 3 (UVD3), a dedicated video playback accelerator for HD video, online video and Blu-ray 3D, while it also offers quality improvements such as advanced post-processing and scaling, dynamic contrast enhancement, color correction.