AMD Gets the Direct CU Treatment

In the previous roundup I covered the DirectCU II models from Asus featuring NVIDIA based chips.  These boards included the GTX 580, 570, and 560 products.  All of these were DirectCU II based with all the updated features that are included as compared to the original DirectCU products.  With the AMD parts Asus has split the top four products into two categories; DirectCU II and the original DirectCU.  When we start looking at thermal properties and price points, we will see why Asus took this route.

AMD has had a strong couple of years with their graphics chips.  While they were not able to take the single GPU performance crown in this previous generation, their products were very capable and competitive across the board and at every price point.  In fact, there are some features that these cards have at particular price points that make them very desirable in quite a few applications.  In particular are the 2 GB of memory on the HD 6900 series cards where the competition from NVIDIA at those price points features 1 GB and 1.25 GB.  In titles such as Skyrim, with the HD texture DLC enabled, these cards start to limit performance at 1920x1080 and above due to the memory requirements needed for these higher resolution textures.

Read the entire article here.