ATI Radeon HD 5870 released, powered by new DX11 GPU

Wednesday 23rd September 2009, 02:36:00 PM, written by Rys

ATI launched its Radeon HD 5870 this morning, marking the generational debut of DX11-class silicon via a brand new GPU, codenamed Cypress or RV870 depending on whether you like letters or numbers.

RV870 is outwardly a doubling of RV770's core computational resources with a 256-bit interface to its DRAM pool. There are various details that make that a generously high-level analysis, such as the new tesselator hardware, DX11-compliant samplers, dual rasterisers and changes to the internal memory hierarchy, which we'll cover in analysis here soon.

Of our friends that have timely articles describing the new hardware and its performance, we recommend Scott's often-comic analysis at The Tech Report, which goes into detail on the architecture and covers the red-versus-green showdown with various NVIDIA SKUs.

If you can speak French, Damien did a killer job over at Hardware.fr. His look is a deep one, focusing on where "2 x RV770 + DX11" doesn't always do a good explanatory job.

We're done analysing our sample here, so it's a matter of checking and double checking and completing the write up.  We'll also have an in-depth look at DX11 in the near future, and a close look at HD 4770 too which we finished recently but didn't quite get out before today's HD 5870 announcement.

The fastest single graphics board ever produced is available as of today, but stocks are scarce as we speak.  Hopefully that changes, since I want to buy two!


Tagging

ati ± dx11, rv870, cypress, hd, 5870

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