With AMD's new Radeon 6800-series GPUs just announced some days ago, the rumour mill has turned its attention to AMD's next card, the HD 6970.

AMD has confirmed the release of the "Cayman" and the "Antilles" GPUs in Q4 2010. These implementations will find their way to the market trough the upcoming Radeon HD 6970/ HD 6950 (Cayman) and the Radeon HD 6990 (Antilles) graphics cards.

Some early benchmarks with the HD 6970 have appeared online at a post on zol.com. According to the post, the the HD 6970 scored 23,499 marks in the 3DMark Vantage in performance mode. In addition, the card produced 36.6fps at the Unigine Heaven benchmark ( 1,920x1,080px with 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering.)

This means that the 6970 could boast about 20 per cent greater performance than its predecessor and gain a ten per cent lead over NVIDIA's best.

However, if the rumours of a GTX 580 which is 20 per cent faster than the GTX 480 come to bear, the Radeon will once again be forced to settle for second place. However, Nvidia's response, the GF110-based GeForce GTX 580 (early December release), will be also reportedly 20% faster than the currently available GeForce GTX 480.