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Component maker Sapphire has officially launched the Mac Edition of its Radeon HD 7950 video card. The add-on includes 3GB of GDDR5 memory, and is said to boost game framerates by as much as 200 percent or more, and general benchmark performance by about 30 percent. Graphics-heavy benchmarks are claimed to run up to 300 percent faster than possible with the NVIDIA GeForce 8800GT.
AMD has hoped to corner the more widely accessible range of high-end video cards Tuesday by unveiling the Radeon HD 7950. It trims back slightly from the range-leading 7970 with 1,792 visual processing cores instead of 2,048, 112 texture units instead of 128, and both 800MHz core and 1.25GHz memory clock speeds versus the 925MHz and 1.38GHz of its counterpart. The chipset is still powerful enough to handle 4K video and carries the 384-bit memory bus and 3GB of video RAM.
Graphics hardware's Sapphire at CeBIT has shown one of the first ultra high-end versions of the Radeon HD 5970 in a bid to have the fastest video cards in the world. The special model will double the amount of onboard memory to a record 4GB and will carry a custom, three-slot fan and heatsink cooling system. Although thick, the design would let Sapphire factory overclock the 5970's memory from 1GHz to 1.2GHz.
AMD this morning launched its second new video chipset in just a matter of days and this time targeted a comparatively untapped mini PC category. The Radeon HD 5570 is a major step up in performance from the 5450 with 400 stream processors versus 80 but still occupies a single card slot and is relatively short, making it ideal for small form factor cases where even the 5600 series would be too large or use too much power.
AMD early Tuesday took its Radeon HD 4000-series chipsets into ultra budget territory with two video cards that promise better performance than their prices would suggest. The Radeon HD 4550 and Radeon HD 4350 have just 80 stream (effects) processors versus as much as 800 for the Radeon 4800 series but are still capable of full DirectX 10.1 and current OpenGL 2.x effects, rendering them some of the least expensive cards capable of their more advanced visuals. The new chipsets are also some of the only ones of their type to have 7.1-channel audio pass-through over HDMI and the option of DisplayPort.
AMD is preparing a dual-chip version of its Radeon HD 4870 card within a matter of weeks, say board designers. The 4870 X2 would be a direct sequel to the 3870 X2 and would once again graft two high-end graphics processors on to one card with a similarly doubled amount of memory; the 4870 edition would be the first home card to carry 2GB of total memory. Past cards have also been underclocked slightly from the single-chip version to avoid overheating.
AMD is gearing up for the launch of a special Radeon HD 4800 card designed explicitly to push past the GeForce GTX 280 in sheer performance, according to a new leak. The unnamed hardware would use the extra energy headroom of the card along with a custom water cooling system to clock the card well above the company's best individual card, the 4870: the core would reach 950MHz or more, while the video memory would be pushed to a 1.2GHz actual speed.
