AMD might have just launched the new Radeon HD 6870 and HD 6850 graphics cards a week ago, but many are already looking forward to the company's real high-end offering: the Cayman-based Radeon HD 6970. We don't expect the new cards to hit stores until sometime next month, but Chinese-language site Zol.com claims to have got its hands on a sample and has posted some benchmark results for the world to see.

The site's numbers cover both 3DMark Vantage and the Unigine Heaven benchmark, with the Radeon HD 6970 allegedly scoring 23,499 on the first one while delivering 36.6fps on the Unigine benchmark running at 1920 x 1,080 with 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering. By comparison, a GTX 480 on the same platform scored 21,106 in 3DMark and ran Unigine Heaven at 29.5fps, while an HD 5870 managed 19,337 and 17.3, respectively.

Going by these numbers it looks like AMD's upcoming card will bring a 10% performance improvement over Nvidia's flagship card, the GTX 480, while boasting around 20% greater performance the Radeon HD 5870 it's replacing. With the Radeon HD 6870 putting on an impressive show, we're definitely looking forward to see how the new Cayman-based Radeon cards perform. For now, though, we'll take this leak with a grain of salt.