AMD releases world's fastest graphics card

 

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Posted on 18 Nov 2009 at 16:59

AMD has released the ATI Radeon HD 5970, which has enabled it to well and truly dominate the high-end of the graphics card market, leaving archrival Nvidia struggling to get its next generation architecture out of the door.

It follows on from the release of the Radeon HD 5800 and 5700 series cards, which filled the mainstream and performance segments of the market. The new card is aimed squarely at hardcore gamers and enthusiasts and, at over £500 a pop, you'd better be pretty enthusiastic!

It has a pair of ATI Cypress GPUs on its 11.5in-long board, giving it a phenomenal 3,200 stream processors. The size will be a cause for concern, as it seriously limits the cases it can fit into - very few cases support cards longer than about 10.5in without modification.

The two graphics processors are clocked at 725MHz, which is the same default clock speed as the Radeon HD 5850, but there are 220 per cent more execution units (each one has 1,600 stream processors, just like a single Radeon HD 5870), so performance is understandably quite a bit higher than the 5870.

In Crysis, the 5970 is around 50 per cent faster than the 5870 at 1,680 x 1,050 with 4xAA and high quality details, with an average frame rate of 70 fps. At 2,560 x 1,600 0xAA, it's 45 per cent faster and importantly maintains playable frame rates with a 42 fps average - the highest we've seen from any graphics card to date.

The card also features 2GB of GDDR5 memory running at 1,000MHz (4,000MHz effective), but because it uses multiple GPUs, you'll only get an effective 1GB of memory because it mirrors data across the two memory partitions.

It features full support for DirectX 11 for improved visuals via tessellation and a number of new graphical effects, ATI Eyefinity for triple-monitor gaming. If anything, this is the card that's begging for resolutions higher than any single monitor will give you - at least, based on our early testing where we seemed to bump into CPU limitations or frame rate caps more often than not.

Being an enthusiast graphics card, AMD practically begs you to overclock it and has built in a number of features to help overclockers achieve great results. The 725MHz core clock should leave some decent headroom, as will the memory, which is actually rated to 1,250MHz (5,000MHz effective). There's also built-in support for voltage tweaking too, should you want to singe your eyebrows while you're at it.

Availability will be very limited, but so will demand based on its current asking price of around £520 (inc VAT). We'll be publishing a full review online once we've completed all of our benchmarks.

Author: Tim Smalley