$699 Radeon HD 6990 graphics card announced by AMD

For gamers and enthusiasts who aren't willing to settle for just an ordinary video card—you know, the kind with only one GPU—the Radeon HD 6990, which AMD is releasing today, could be the next must-have product.

As the 6000-series replacement for 2009's ATI Radeon HD 5970, the 6990 boasts a pair of powerful graphics processing units (GPUs), and some of the speediest specs on the market: compute power of 5.1 teraflops, a core clock speed of 830 MHz, 3,072 stream processors, 192 texture units, 64 ROPs, and 4GB of GDDR5 frame buffer running a long a 5-Gbps, 256-bit memory path. For adventurous users who want even faster frame rates, a switch on the card itself can automatically overclock the card to still-higher levels of performance.

Unlike most other AMD video cards, the 6990 does not pretend to be power-friendly. It can max out at 375 watts of power usage under load (450 watts) when overclocked, and utilizes a new technology called PowerTune to keep the electricity usage as low as possible and safe above 300 watts. The 6990 also requires two eight-pin connections from your power supply.

Like other video cards in the 6000 series, the 6990 supports two new kinds of anti-aliasing, morphological and "Enhanced-Coverage," as well as AMD's multimonitor technology Eyefinity. AMD has striven to make it easier to use than ever by changing the card's output ports to one dual-link DVI and four Mini DisplayPort and including three Mini DisplayPort adapters with every card.

If the 6990 promises big performance when it comes to DirectX 11 games, there's something else big about it: its $699 list price.

For more information about the AMD Radeon HD 6990, and to see how its performance stacks up against the 5970 and Nvidia's top-end GeForce GTX 580, read PCMag's review.

This article, written by Matthew Murray, originally appeared on PCMag.com and is republished on Gear Live with the permission of Ziff Davis, Inc..