AMD Starts Selling Second Radeon HD 7900-Series Graphics Card.

In a bid to further improve its competitive positions on the market of high-end graphics cards, Advanced Micro Devices on Wednesday began selling a cut-down version of its high-end code-named Tahiti graphics chip. The new Radeon HD 7950 promises slightly better performance compared to Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 at lower - $449 - price-point.

The new Radeon HD 7950 "Tahiti Pro" belongs to Southern Islands family of graphics processing units (GPUs) and is based on the so-called graphics core next (GCN) architecture. The model 7950 supports all the advantages that the GCN has to offer, including support for DirectX 11.1, OpenCL 1.2, ultra high-definition output support, optimized power consumption,  and other new technologies.

Compute performance of the Radeon HD 7950 is substantially lower - by around 25% - compared to its older brother 7970. Still, thanks to new architecture and support for new features it is likely to become popular when at $449 price-point.