AMD today launched a new graphics card, the Radeon HD 6790, in the crowded $150 price segment. The new card is based on the same Barts GPU that powers the Radeon HD 6800 series. The card is aimed at NVIDIA's recently released GTX 550, which was initially priced at $150 but currently it can be found online for $130. So at least pricewise, the new Radeon HD 6790 is positioned against a GeForce GTX 460 768MB or a Radeon HD 6850 ( $160).



The 6790 is a cut-down from the 6850, losing 2 SIMD units and half of its ROPs but also features higher clockspeeds for both the core and the memory. The card has 800 SPs and 16 ROPs operating at 840MHz. It comes with 1GB GDDR5 memory clocked at 1050 MHz:

	AMD Radeon HD 6870	AMD Radeon HD 6850	AMD Radeon HD 5830	AMD Radeon HD 6790	AMD Radeon HD 5770
Stream Processors	1120	960	1120	800	800
Texture Units	56	48	56	40	40
ROPs	32	32	16	16	16
Core Clock	900MHz	775MHz	800MHz	840MHz	850MHz
Memory Clock	1.05GHz (4.2GHz data rate) GDDR5	1GHz (4GHz data rate) GDDR5	1GHz (4GHz data rate) GDDR5	1050MHz (4.2GHz data rate) GDDR5	1.2GHz (4.8GHz data rate) GDDR5
Memory Bus Width	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	256-bit	128-bit
VRAM	1GB	1GB	1GB	1GB	1GB
Transistor Count	1.7B	1.7B	2.15B	1.7B	956M
Manufacturing Process	TSMC 40nm	TSMC 40nm	TSMC 40nm	TSMC 40nm	TSMC 40nm
Price Point	~$200	~$160		$149	~$110

At 150W, the card requires 2 PCIe power sockets. It has also 1x dual link DVI out, 1x HDMI out and 1x Mini Displayport out.

Other features include:

- Second generation Microsoft DirectX 11 support
- PCI Express 2.1 x16 bus interface
- "Eye-Definition" graphics
- AMD Eyefinity multi-display technology
- AMD EyeSpeed visual acceleration
- UVD 3 dedicated video playback accelerator
- AMD Accelerated Parallel Processing technology
- DirectCompute 11
- OpenCL Support
- AMD HD3D technology
- Blu-ray 3D support - AMD CrossfireX multi-GPU technology
- Integrated HDMI 1.4a with support for stereoscopic 3D
- Integrated HD audio controller
- AMD PowerPlay power management technology