SAPPHIRE Announces Radeon HD 6850 Vapor-X Edition

SAPPHIRE Technology has just announced a new high performance model in its extensive series of graphics cards - the HD 6850 Vapor-X Edition with SAPPHIRE exclusive Vapor-X cooler. The SAPPHIRE HD 6850 Vapor-X Edition has the same internal architecture as the standard model, with 960 stream processors and 48 texture processing units, but clock speeds are increased to 800MHz for the core and 1100Mhz (4.4 Gb/sec effective) for the memory giving users a considerable boost in performance.

The SAPPHIRE exclusive Vapor-X cooler ensures that the card runs quietly and efficiently. Together with other special hardware features including on-board 10-phase power control and SAPPHIRE’s highly efficient, cool running second generation Black Diamond chokes this ensures there is a good margin for performance tuning (overclocking) by enthusiast users. SAPPHIRE’s overclocking tool for these models - TriXX - is available free for anyone to download from a link on the SAPPHIRE website.

Eyefinity and APP Acceleration
The SAPPHIRE HD 6850 Vapor-X Edition has the versatile output configuration of two DVI, one HDMI and two mini DisplayPort connectors. Using two of the DVI/HDMI outputs as well as the two DisplayPorts enables this card to support up to four monitors in Eyefinity (SLS) mode.

In the HD 6850 Vapor-X Edition the third generation UVD (Unified Video Decoder) supports MVC (Multi-view Video Coding) for the smooth decoding of Blu-Ray 3D with reduced CPU load as well as other HD file formats. Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio are supported, and HDMI capability is HDMI 1.4a. This provides deep colour, enhanced high resolution output for Digital Theatre applications and 3D stereoscopic support as well as 7.1 high bit-rate audio.

The multiple stream processors of the HD 6800 series can be used to accelerate other applications such as video transcoding. The latest generation of web browsers can be GPU accelerated, and this is also supported for enhanced productivity in Microsoft Office 2010.

Second Generation DX11 support
The SAPPHIRE HD 6800 series features the second generation of graphics technology from AMD designed to support all the features of Microsoft DirectX 11 and DirectCompute 11. This family of GPU’s is built in AMD’s 40nm process to deliver high performance with low power consumption.

Advanced hardware features include an enhanced Tessellation unit, dedicated HDR Texture compression, multi-threaded communication with system CPU cores, embedded support for many of the DirectCompute 11 instructions, 3D stereoscopic support, HDMI 1.4a and DisplayPort 1.2.

The SAPPHIRE HD 6800 series is supported by AMD's DirectX 11 WHQL certified graphics driver which delivers support for all of the key DirectX 11 features required for enhanced gaming experiences as well as GPU acceleration of supported applications.