The Radeon HD 5870 new demonstrated us the joys of ATI's DirectX 11.0 technology, but it was the 5850 that shoe-horned it into a scheme that offered actual value for the impassioned gamer.


Together graphics chips are produced utilizing the 40nm process. The 5850 is a small littler than the 5870, but it too functions cooler and takes without power at 151W below maximum load. It needs a couple of six-pin power links. You acquire both HDMI and DVI slots, and the 5850 can support up to three display. Eyefinity includes the power to stretch few games across those 3 displays.


The common architecture is founded on a 256bit memory interface. The specifications have been trimmed somewhat, so the 5870’s 850MHz core clock turns 725MHz in the 5850. The memory clock velocity has been turned down from 1.2GHz to 1GHz, and the number of stream processors is sliced from 1,600 to a even effective 1,440. Entire this should give the

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5850 the edge over together the GTX 470 and 480. Its floating point of 2.09TFlops is near double that of the GTX 470’s 1.09TFlops, when the fill rate sees it beat still the GTX 480 through more than 10.2GTps. This is due to a generous sampling of texture units.


But superiority on paper does not ever answer in a ordering lead in actual-world function. The 5850 is a dumber card than the GTX 470, but the difference was not as excellent as the cost gap may hint. In Hawx, it trailed through about 8 to 12fps, but in Aliens versus Predator the dissimilar was without than 2fps as complete steps were increased. Our Crysis tries at times saw the 5850 baffle its rival.


Of the boards we have tried currently, the 5850 looked the excellent drop in function when proceeding from DirectX 10.x to 11.0. We suspect this card will have some troubles with future DirectX 11.0 games, nevertheless.


The 5850 is dumber than the GTX 470 in most tries. But it prices without and functions cooler and smoother.