The AMD HD5870 - the fastest single-GPU card available?

INTRODUCTION

By now we are used to seeing new video cards being released from AMD and NVIDIA in the spring and fall. This year is not different except that it coincides with the release of Windows 7 together with DirectX for Windows 7 and Windows Vista. Since AMD already has had experience with some of the new features of DX 11 through the support of DX10.1, which is a sub-set to DX11, it probably is no surprise that it looks like AMD will be the first vendor to offer cards with DirectX 11 support.

During a hectic day in September we visited AMD in London and got all the info about the new HD5800-series of GPU’s.

We went home pretty impressed about what we saw but as we all know you never can trust marketing or the PR-guys so it was of course lucky that AMD also let us bring home a card so we could put it through its paces in our Swedish offices in Stockholm.

This is what you will find in this article/review:

Part 1: Overview of the HD5800 with specifications
Our first stop is to look more closely at the specifications and features of the two new cards that are announced today: the HD5850 and the HD5870.

Part 2: Overview on DirectX11 as well as OpenCL
Next we look into the new features of DirectX11 as well as talk a bit about OpenCL.

Part 3: Eyefinity
One of AMD’s new features is the ability to use several monitors as one huge monitor. We explain the feature and of course test it ourselves.

Part 4: The benchmarks
Of course everyone is eager to see the scores and we’ve compared the HD5870 against the HD4870 1 GB, the HD4890, the GeForce GTX285 and the GeForce 295 on 2 different machines to see what the raw power of the HD5870 really can do in real games.

Part 5: The Conclusion