Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 due to launch on 22nd October

You may remember the article that we posted yesterday entitled “Radeon HD 6800 performance figures leaked” where we discovered figures for the highly anticipated 68xx series cards from graphics giant AMD. It turns out that we’ve had more news come to us about these up and coming cards.

The launch of the 68xx series cards codenamed Barts PRO and XT will launch on 22nd October 2010 but sadly will be slower than the already best selling 5850 and 5870, i guess the higher number the better doesn’t count with AMD based cards any more?

Not all is lost though, as the 6890 6950 and 6970 are due to launch this year with their Cayman branded GPU’s. The model numbers aren’t concrete as of yet and no figures have even been spoke about but this seems like the logical way forward for AMD.

The two cards due to launch next friday include some of the following specifications:

Radeon HD 6850

• 1GB GDDR5
• HDMI
• DVI-I
• DVI-D
• DisplayPort

Radeon HD 6870

• 1GB GDDR5
• HDMI
• DVI-I
• DVI-D
• Dual Mini DisplayPort

From our sources, these cards should start making their way to shops by this weekend ready to sell on the launch date, so make sure you keep an eye out.

It’s something i was looking forward to, but since I now know about the performance vs the 58xx series cards. I’m not so eager.