Let’s start with the good news. For you penny pinchers, AMD apparently plans to release a Radeon HD 6950 videcoard with half the amount of RAM as the original (1GB versus 2GB). It’s a safe bet that cutting the frame buffer in half will impact performance in some games at certain resolutions and visual quality settings, but depending on the price, it could be an acceptable trade-off.
That leads us to the bad news. According to Hardware Canucks, which claims to have spoken with AMD about the upcoming card, the lesser equipped HD 6950 in 1GB trim will sell for $279. If that is indeed the case, gamers on a strict budget will have to decide if it’s worth saving a mere $20 over a standard HD 6950 with the full 2GB, and that’s without factoring in mail-in-rebates (Newegg lists a handful of 2GB 6950 cards marked down after rebate, including an HIS model for $270 post-rebate).
All other specs will remain the same, HC says, including the stock speeds and stream processor count.
Image Credit: AMD
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