We've got a few fresh morsels of GPU information to pick over today, and since neither is meaty enough for its own story, we're lumping them in together.
First up, we have what purport to be a pair of photos of NVIDIA's GTX 580. While this card is all but a dead cert now - having appeared briefly on the company's website last week - we still know very little the actual GPU. Current rumours suggest that it will be a 'complete' Fermi core codenamed GF110 with the full complement of 512 shaders and a number of architectural tweaks. Despite only adding 32 cores, estimates suggest that performance could increase by as much as 20 per cent compared to the GTX 480.
Unfortunately, there aren't any new details that we can glean from the pictures - it's not even possible to say with certainty whether it features one or two GPUs - and with the shroud, it just looks like a generic NVIDIA card.
On the other side of the battle lines, Fudzilla is reporting on a few tiny scraps about the upcoming Radeon HD 6970. The first is that the cards are expected to run pretty hot - especially by AMD standards - as a result of the engineers trying to squeeze out every last drop of performance.
Apparently the core will be more than just a slight tweak to the HD 5870, with the developers making some fairly major adjustments and adding quite a bit to the GPU. While the current crop of cards are renowned for being cool runners, adding cores and cranking up the speed can seriously increase the temperature, as we saw with the HD 6870.
Nonetheless, AMD is apparently feeling pretty confident about the card, as it would seem that comparisons are already being made to the R300 architecture that powered the Radeon 9700. That card was the flagship during ATI's period of dominance over the lacklustre GeForce FX-series and there are suggestions that history may repeat itself nearly a decade later.
