ATI Radeon HD 5870

AMD/ATI’s next-gen Radeon HD 5870 graphics card 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 demonstrated it had mastered with the 4770.

First some numbers: 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 lots of new tricks work, the foremost being DirectX 11. Yes, this is the first and only DX11-capable card available.

DX11’s new features included multi-threaded rendering, better tessellation and shadows, better physics and AI calculations, new types of transparency, and real-time post processing. All this means we should expect vast improvements in textures, shading, antialiasing, and effects such as HDR lighting, depth of field, lens effects, realistic shadows in DX11 games, which will start trickling in from October onwards. DX11 also brings in DirectCompute 11, which will tie into Windows 7’s GPU optimizations to enable desktop acceleration.

Stream technology is another buzzword. This is what AMD pitches as its open-standards-compliant approach to GPU processing. Stream is implemented in both hardware and software, and 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, while designers and analysts can benefit too, especially now that LCD prices are so low.

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

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• GPU: ATI Radeon HD 5870
• Stream processors: 1600
• RAM: 1 GB GDDR5
• Process: 40nm
• Core | Memory speeds: 850 MHz | 1200 MHz
• Outputs: DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort

The expected price is Rs. 24,990.