ATI launches world's first DirectX 11 graphics card: the Radeon HD 5870

 

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Posted on 22 Sep 2009 at 23:08

A third benefit of DirectX 11 is multithreaded rendering. Again, this simply means that the full power of a dual-, triple- or quad-core CPU can be used, avoiding the traditional bottleneck which slowed a fast graphics card down. In theory, it should lead to more frames per second in the latest games.

EyeFinity

Not content with merely extra power, ATI has also innovated with features like Eyefinity. This may just be a marketing word for supporting multiple monitors, but it's good to see the HD 5870 supporting three monitors rather than the traditional two. We already covered the details of Eyefinity two weeks ago, but suffice to say that the HD 5870 is more than powerful enough to drive three 1080p monitors when playing the latest games like Dirt 2.

Even if you're not interested in Eyefinity for gaming, it means you can have three monitors on your desk running at the same or different resolutions, horizontally or vertically and work even more efficiently than before. Soon, ATI says special Eyefinity6 cards will be available with six DisplayPort outputs for running six monitors from a single card.

Power

The Radeon HD 5870 processor has 2.15 billion transistors inside it, compared with 956 million in the HD 4870. This partially explains why it's roughly twice as fast, but the good news is that it doesn't generate twice the heat or use twice the power. This is because ATI has used a smaller manufacturing process which reduces the GPU's size. While the 4870 used a maximum of 160W, the new card uses little more at 188W. Importantly, it uses just 27W when idle, compared to the 4870's 90W.

During our testing, we were impressed with the card's quiet fan, which was never noisy even when running benchmarks. While we haven't had enough time to fully test it's overclocking potential, we're certain that there's plenty of scope to get even better performance from this amazing GPU.

The Verdict

It's really too early to say whether the HD 5870 is the ultimate graphics card - much will depend on whether lots of awe-inspiring DirectX 11 games appear soon. It's fairly certain that the HD 5870 won't be the best-value card in the new 5000 range, but it will still inject life into your existing DirectX 9 and 10 games collection, thank to its astonishing power which should allow you to ramp all the graphical settings to the max, and enjoy your games again - the way the developers intended you to.

If your budget won't quite stretch to £270, fear not. There's a good chance that existing fast cards like the HD 4870 and 4890 will plummet in price, so you might be able to bag a bargain.

Author: Jim Martin