VGA AMD Radeon HD 6970M

Specification VGA AMD Radeon HD 6970M

Manufacturer	AMD
Radeon HD 6900M Series	Radeon HD 6990M Crossfire 2240 @ 715MHz 256 Bit @ 900MHz Radeon HD 6970M Crossfire 1920 @ 680MHz 256 Bit @ 900MHz Radeon HD 6990M 1120 @ 715MHz 256 Bit @ 900MHz Radeon HD 6970M 960 @ 680MHz 256 Bit @ 900MHz Radeon HD 6950M 960 @ 580MHz 256 Bit @ 900MHz
Codename	Blackcomb XT
Architecture	Terascale 2
Pipelines	960 - unified
Core Speed *	680 MHz
Shader Speed *	680 MHz
Memory Speed *	900 MHz
Memory Bus Width	256 Bit
Memory Type	GDDR5
Max. Amount of Memory	2048 MB
Shared Memory	no
DirectX	DirectX 11, Shader 5.0
Power Consumption	75-100 Watt
Transistors	1700 Million
technology	40 nm
Notebook Size	large
Date of Announcement	06.01.2011

The AMD Mobility Radeon HD 6970M (or sometimes called ATI Mobility Radeon HD 6970) is a high-end graphics card normally reserved for big and heavy laptops. It is based on the desktop HD 6850 graphics card and therefore features UVD3 video processing and Eyefinity+. The codename of this GPU is Blackcomb XT and it should have comparable power consumption results as the GeForce GTX 480M.

The 960 Stream processors are still based on the "old" 5D architecture similar to the 5000 series. Therefore, the number of shaders is not comparable to the 1D cores of current Nvidia GPUs. The Tessellation performance should be improved (like the desktop 6800 series) with the new cards. The Stream processors can be used with DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.1, DirectCompute 11 and OpenCL. With the latter two, the 6970M can also be used for general computations such as transcoding videos.

The 3D performance of this card lies between the GeForce GTX 470M and 485M, both of which are high-end notebook GPUs. In our tests, the 6970M is on average 33% faster than a GeForce GTX 480M, but the newer GTX 485M is still about 12% faster than the AMD card. Compared to the previous generation ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870, the Radeon 6970M is about 50% faster, but has greater power demands.

For gamers, this means that the Radeon HD 6970M is able to fluently display all most modern games in high detail settings. Only Crysis and Metro 2033 stutter in the highest detail settings at 1920x1080 resolution (see below).

The new UVD3 video decoder supports the decoding of MPEG-4 AVC/H.264, VC-1, MPEG-2, Flash and now also Multi-View Codec (MVC) and MPEG-4 part 2 (DivX, xVid) HD videos on the graphics card.

Furthermore, the HD 6900M series integrates an HD audio controller to transmit HD Audio (TrueHD or DTS Master Audio) over HDMI and/or DisplayPort (e.g. for Blu-Ray videos).

The AMD HD3D Technology offers support for Blu-Ray 3D and 3D displays (integrated and external). However, the solution is not as mature as Nvidia's 3D Vision.

Thanks to Eyefinity, the graphics chip is able to theoretically drive up to 6 monitors simultaneously. However, this only works if the laptop features enough video outputs.

The power consumption of the 6790M should be similar to the Nvidia GeForce GTX 480M / 485M and is therefore at about 100 Watts when considering the MXM board and the 2 GB GDDR5 memory. Eurocom, for example, states that the TDP ranges from about 75-100 Watts. As a result, the card is only suited for large laptops with good cooling solutions.