Announced today, AMD/ATI-based graphics card maker SAPPHIRE has just released a 2GB refresh of its SAPPHIRE HD 6850.
Oddly enough, aside from the increase in RAM from 1GB to 2GB, nothing much appears to have changed regarding the specifications of this card, other than an update to support the DisplayPort 1.2 specification, enabling up to three monitor Eyefinity support with the aid of an appropriate hub.
The card retains the following specifications of its older brother, aside, of course, for the increase in memory:
| Output |
1 x Dual-Link DVI
1 x DisplayPort 1 x Single-Link DVI-D 1 x HDMI 1.4a DisplayPort 1.2 |
| GPU |
775 MHz Core Clock
960 x Stream Processors 40 nm Chip |
| Memory |
4000 MHz Effective
2048 MB Size 256 -bit GDDR5 |
| API |
Microsoft DirectX® 11
Shader Model 5.0 OpenGL® 4.1 |
| Software |
Driver CD
SAPPHIRE TriXX Utility |
SAPPHIRE claims that the increase in memory will benefit "demanding applications and specific graphical demands such as large textures maps in the latest games." It will be interesting to see if the increase in memory really has a significant performance impact on a modern game such as Crysis 2 or Battlefield 3 and if the pricing of the 2GB card will remain approximately the same as the original 1GB edition or at the very least, proportional to any performance gains.
