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NVIDIA SLI faces AMD CrossFire in a triple-GPU shootout
Place your bets, folks, because this one's gonna get ugly. On your left: a thunderous triad of AMD Radeon HD 6950 cards running in CrossFire. On your right: the terrorizing threat of triple NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 in SLI. In the middle: a Tom's Hardware tester just trying to stay alive. The winner? Well, as usual in these benchmark articles that sort of depends on what you're doing, but in general it's the AMD solution and its CrossFire barrage that comes out on top in terms of performance, cost, and even efficiency. But, that's certainly far from the whole story. You'll want to click on through to read about every agonizing blow.
AMD Radeon HD 6950 can be turned into an HD 6970 using a BIOS hack
Ah, the joy of getting something for nothing -- that's what this time of year is all about, right? The techPowerUp! guys seem to think so, and they've got the perfect gift for all you thrifty PC gaming enthusiasts: a BIOS flash for the Radeon HD 6950 that unlocks the full potential of its hardware (in other words, it turns it into an HD 6970). We already knew the two retail SKUs were built on the same Cayman core, but this hack confirms that all the 6950's performance handicaps have been enacted in software rather than hardware, leaving you all to flip a switch, click a few confirmatory dialogs, and get your game on. You should be aware that the retail 6970 card uses an 8-pin and a 6-pin connector for its auxiliary power whereas the 6950 only has a pair of 6-pin intakes, which might cause trouble under extreme loads, and there's also the fact that you'll most likely be hacking your warranty away together with your GPU's limitations. But hey, you can't make eggnog without cracking a few eggs.
AMD GPU roadmap points to a happy 2011 for Radeon lovers
The ATI name might be dead, but Radeon graphics cards are only growing bigger, bolder and better. AMD's recent financial analyst day has made official what many of us already knew or suspected: there'll be three new high-end GPUs forthcoming in the first quarter of 2011. The slides explicitly describe the recently launched HD 6870 / 6850 as mere refreshes, aiming to bring HD 5800 series performance in a more efficient package, but peek beyond them and you'll see an armada of HD 6900 chips just itching to bring the fight to NVIDIA and its newly crowned GTX 580 king of the single-GPU hill. No specs yet, of course, but at least we now know there'll be some fireworks to greet us early in the new year. Oh, and if the mobile realm is more your thing, we've got a shot of AMD's plans on that front waiting for you just after the break.
