Mistake may have led to all new HD 6790 cards shipping with extra performance. UPDATE 9/4/11 – Software counting error, 16 ROPs is correct
Mistake may have led to all new HD 6790 cards shipping with extra performance. UPDATE 9/4/11 – Software counting error, 16 ROPs is correct
After some reports of the new AMD Radeon HD 6790 showing 24 ROPs in popular information tool, GPU-Z, it appears it may not be a simple error in the program, but a miscommunication between AMD and it’s partners or production plant. The recently released AMD Radeon HD 6970 ships with a 40nm Barts LE chip and 16 ROPs enabled (of a possible 32).
This is good news for the consumer, as the GPU will be equipped with slightly more geometry processing power than expected, but it’s bad news for AMD if this is a genuine mistake. AMD have already recently stated that the HD 6970 will not allow stream processors to be unlocked but it has good overclocking potential.
Could this be AMD continuing to encourage us to play the odds unlockable parts (think HD 6950, CPU core unlocking and so on), or a genuine mistake?
We await an official statement from AMD.
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Source
UPDATE 9/4/11 – It seems the way the tool GPU-Z counts the number of disabled ROPs is incorrect for the Radeon HD 6790 and in fact, the actual count of 16 is correct, so there is no mistake by AMD or partners and all cards are in fact shipping with the designed number of ROPs enabled.
Explanation here
