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Sunday, September 27, 2009

ATI Radeon HD 5870 DX11 Video Card Review

the most anticipated video cards of all time, the ATI Radeon HD 5870 and Radeon HD 5850! These are the world's first and only DirectX 11 graphics cards, and yes, they are out before Windows 7 or a DirectX 11 ready video game has even hit the market. Truth be told, AMD has WHQL certified drivers out for Windows 7 and the new Radeon HD 5000 series is a monster to say the least.
ATI Radeon HD 5870 DirectX 11 Video Card

Many of you might be asking yourselves right now, how was AMD able to get out the world's first DirectX 11 graphics card before Intel or NVIDIA? Or you might be wondering how AMD was able to re-take the single card GPU performance crown without NVIDIA catching on? Well, the answer was to keep the 40nm manufacturing process the same and continue to squeeze the most out of the GDDR5 memory interface that AMD has been using now for four generations of graphics cards.  By keeping the pillars of the video card the same, AMD was able to focus on features and adding more transistors. It seems they have done a good job at that as they have more than doubled the number of transistors on the Radeon HD 5870 when compared to the Radeon HD 4870 graphics card. While doubling the performance usually means higher prices you can smile knowing that the Radeon HD 5870 is launching at $379 and the Radeon HD 5850 is at $259.

ATI Radeon HD 5870 DirectX 11 Video Card

The design goals that the AMD engineers followed were provided to Legit Reviews and can be seen in the marketing slide above. Clearly the goal of the Radeon HD 5000 series was to add DirectX 11 support, but it also targeted the performance of the card and the goal was to double the performance level of the previous Radeon HD 4800 series of GPUs. If that goal wasn't already lofty enough they wanted to build upon the stream computing platform and add new features like ATI Eyefinity Technology and image quality enhancements. Basically, AMD had a fairly large wish list of features and improvements they wanted to make and was able to pull it off!

ATI Radeon HD 5870 Terscale

The end result is something like this: The ATI Radeon HD 5870 video card has over 2 TeraFlops of compute power thanks to 1600 stream processors running at a core clock speed of 850MHz.  The 1GB GDDR5 frame buffer running at 1200MHz is good enough for more than 150 GB/sec of memory bandwidth. Considering that the card has a max power draw of 188W and supports three display outputs (each at up to a screen resolution of 2560x1600), you find yourself with a graphics card that walks all over the ATI Radeon HD 4870.

ATI Radeon HD 5870 versus Radeon HD 4870

The only negative is that the Radeon HD 5870 uses slightly more power at load, but for double the performance we are shocked that the difference is only 1.17x as the number of transistors more than doubled. When comparing the Radeon HD 5870 to the Radeon HD 4870 the difference between the two cards is impressive. The 150+ GB/sec GDDR5 memory interface is more than enough for most of your GPU reviews.

ATI Radeon HD 5870 Terscale

The ATI Radeon HD 5870 has 20 SIMD engines that each have 16 Thread Processors. A thread processor contains 5 stream cores, so this is how the Radeon HD 5870 has 1600 total stream processors. The GPU has a grand total of 80 Texture Units, which means that each Single Instruction, Multiple Data (SIMD) engine has 4 Texture Units available to it exclusively.

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