AMD launches sub-£100 Radeon HD 5670, promising DirectX 11 and triple- monitor gaming for the masses

 

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Posted on 14 Jan 2010 at 12:53

AMD has launched the cheapest DirectX 11 graphics yet - the Radeon HD 5670. Like the other 5000-series cards, the newcomers supports Eyefinity, which means you can connect three monitors and play games across all three.

That's the theory, at least. At around £75 for the 512MB version and £95 for the 1GB version, it sounds too good to be true to run games at 4,800x900 (three monitors running at 1,600x900). From our very brief testing of our 1GB review sample, it looks like it is. We ran Crysis at High detail settings with no antialiasing at 1,280x1,024 and saw a rather disappointing result of 23fps. This doesn't bode well if you want to play the latest games without spending a fortune.

The reason behind the lack of performance is a stripped-down GPU, which has just 400 shader processors, compared with 1,600 on the HD 5870 and 800 on the 5770. It also has a slower clock speed of 775MHz compared to 850MHz on the latter two models, and a memory speed of 1GHz which is 200MHz slower than its two siblings.

One of our favourite budget graphics cards is the Radeon HD 4770, which costs around £75 for the 512MB version. This card may not support DirectX 11, but is around 30 per cent quicker in Crysis. We'll have to wait until we've completed our testing until we can see the HD 5760's true performance, but initial impressions aren't good.

There are other reasons you might want to opt for the new card rather than a 4770 (or indeed an Nvidia GeForce 9800GT, which is similar in price and performance to the 4770). One is support for Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio, thanks to PAP support. Protected Audio Path is a feature many HDMI-equipped graphics cards lack, and therefore don't support these lossless formats. Before you rush out and buy a 5670 for your media centre PC, though, bear in mind that while this is a single-slot card, it isn't low profile so will only fit in cases that can take full-height expansion cards.

Next, there's ATI Stream and DirectCompute. It means that the HD 5670 can accelerate Flash 10.1 video to reduce the load on your CPU, and can also accelerate video transcoding with applications like CyberLink's Espresso and PowerDirector 8. Plus it can upscale DVD and other standard-definition video using ArcSoft's TotalMedia Theatre 3.

There are still plenty of reasons not to buy any DirectX 11 card yet, though. One is that the number of games that support it are severely limited, and prices will surely drop by the time the number of DX11 games increases. Secondly, if you're excited by the prospect of triple-monitor gaming, remember that you need at least one monitor with a DisplayPort input - these are also few and far between, and cost several hundred pounds, even for a 23in model.

We'll bring you a full review of the HD 5670 shortly.