Advanced Micro Devices late on Monday announced the incoming of premium-class Radeon HD 6950 graphics board with reduced amount of onboard memory at $269 - $279 price-point as well as the massively factory-overclocked versions of its Radeon HD 6870 graphics cards, as x-bitlabs reports.

Various partners of AMD plan to release ATI Radeon HD 6950 graphics cards based on the Cayman graphics processing unit (GPU) with 1408 stream processors and featuring only 1GB of onboard GDDR5 memory, according to a statement of AMD. The new graphics cards will be available starting from mid-February and will cost $279 in the U.S.

At the $279 price-point the Radeon HD 6950 1GB and will pose a more affordable alternative for the company's Radeon HD 6950 (which has similar processing power, but 2GB of memory onboard and $299 price-tag) and a more expensive alternative for the Radeon HD 6870 (which has lower performance and costs from $225 to $259). While in very high resolution, with high FSAA levels and in generally demanding games the model 6970 with 1GB of memory will be slower than be slower compared to the model 6950 with 2GB of memory, in loads of today's games performance of the novelty is likely to be close to that of the 6950 with 2GB of GDDR5.

The intention of AMD to release a lower-priced version of its latest and highest-performing graphics processing unit may indicate that the company is trying to boost or sustain the share on the market of graphics cards of enthusiasts, who like novelties, high speeds and adore latest architectures.

AMD also informed that PowerColor, Sapphire Technologies and XFX plan to release graphics cards based on the Radeon HD 6870 graphics processors with 940MHz - 975MHz chip clock-speed (up from 900MHz on default models) with 1GB of 4400MHz - 4600GHz memory (up from 4200MHz) onboard. Prices will range between $229 to $259 in e-tail depending on partner SKU, AMD said