Roughly this fourth dimension last calendar month we were testing a variety of graphics cards in the new Call of Duty: Black Ops video game. I remember picking upward a Radeon Hard disk drive 4870 and thinking to myself "wow I've had this thing forever", and in a sense I have. Code-named R700, the Radeon Hard disk drive 4000 series was released ii and a one-half years ago and I'm sure many of y'all are still using one of these cards in your desktop PC today.

The follow upwards to the R700 compages was the highly predictable R800, which paved the style for the Radeon HD 5000 series. The king of that series was the Radeon Hd 5870, released on September 2009, the bill of fare packed some 2150 one thousand thousand transistors produced using a 40nm manufacturing process.

The Radeon Hard disk 5870 was a solid success for AMD, as information technology remained their flagship unmarried-GPU product for roughly fifteen months, and it is simply beingness replaced today. When nosotros starting time test collection the Radeon Hard disk drive 5870 we concluded that information technology was one the best graphics cards we had ever reviewed at that price point, which says information technology all really.

Information technology took Nvidia around 6 months to return fire with the GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470 graphics cards, and even so a lot of people, including u.s., felt they had fallen brusque. Nvidia persevered and afterward a few quick price drops along with enhanced driver back up, they eventually fabricated for a more compelling argument.

Further down the track, the release of the GeForce GTX 460 and the refined GF110 architecture helped the company establish a viable mainstream product and gave light of things to come, namely the recent release of the GeForce GTX 580 and GeForce GTX 570 GPUs.

Meanwhile, AMD has been offering a lone Radeon HD 6000 series GPU since October, pitching the new Radeon Hard disk 6870 head on at the GeForce GTX 460 with an MSRP of $240. As impressive as the Radeon Hard disk drive 6870 is at this price signal, not to mention the confusing naming scheme, AMD stressed this wasn't a 5870 replacement.

After a brusque delay, AMD brings us the new Radeon Hard disk 6970. Code-named Cayman XT this new graphics processor features 2640 million transistors, 23% more than that of the 5870. Similar the new Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 and GTX 570 graphics cards which are more refined versions of the GTX 480 and GTX 470 graphics cards, the Radeon Hard disk drive 6970 is essentially a more refined version of the 5870. To find out exactly what this means, read on...