Thread: Ati radeon hd 5870

AMD/ATI's next-gen Radeon HD 5870 is here, and it's a blockbuster. Its architecture is a refinement of the 4xxx series, and is manufactured using the 40nm process that AMD showed it had mastered with the 4770. The 5870 GPU has 1600 shader units (or stream processors) and 80 texture units for over 2 TeraFLOPS of rendering power-exactly twice as many as the 4870. All that power goes into making DirectX 11 work. Yes, this is the first and only DX11-capable card. New features includemulti-threaded rendering, better tessellation and shadows, better physics and AI calculations, new types of transparency, and real-time post processing. Improved textures, shading, antialiasing, and effects such as HDR lighting, depth of field and lens effects in DX11 games will start trickling in from October. DirectCompute 11 ties into Windows 7's GPU optimizations to enable desktop acceleration. Stream technology is another buzzword: this AMD 's open-standards approach to GPU processing. Stream enables better load sharing between CPUs and GPUs so that each does the task it is best suited for. The last cool new trick is Eyefinity, which lets you drive up to 6 HD displays with a single card for up to a crazy 8192x8192 pixel theoretical maximum desktop area! Gamers will love it, especially now that LCD prices are so low.



The HD 5870 card itself is huge and heavy, and comes in black with firetruckred accents. It's nice to see two DVI ports as well as HDMI and DisplayPort on the back. It runs cooler and quieter than expected, but still blocks a lot of room in a big PC cabinet. We used Windows 7 RTM and DX11 with the latest Catalyst drivers. In our tests, the new Radeon easily took the top spot for single-GPU cards, beating its own predecessor, the HD 4890 as well as Nvidia's GTX285. The overall 3DMark score was 14,724, while Crysis gave us 51.52 fps at 1680x1050, Gamer settings, and 2xAA. Sadly, no DX11 games or tests are available yet, but we can't wait to see these in action.

Nvidia's going to have a hard time keeping up; only its dual-GPU GTX295 and SLI solutions can keep up even if prices are cut. With all signs suggesting that their own DX11 generation is still months away, AMD can enjoy this victory for a while.