AMD ATI Radeon HD 5870: Unquestionably Number One

Over the past couple of weeks, we've been completely preoccupied trying to come up with a catchy and informative introduction for this article. We thought maybe it would be fun to play off of AMD's tree-laden GPU codenames to come up with an interesting segue into the Radeon HD 5800 series' power efficiency. But we came up short. Then we thought we could use an image of the Radeon HD 5870's cooler and draw a parallel to the awesomeness that was the original Bat Mobile, but a couple of folks from AMD snagged that idea. Even being briefed on the technology we're about to show you on the very same aircraft carrier that scooped up the Apollo 11 astronauts didn't cure the writer's block.

Then it hit us. Why bother? PC Enthusiasts are always chomping at the bit trying to glean even the slightest bit of information about cutting edge GPU technology. And that's exactly what we've got in store for you right here.

We've got a sneaking suspicion that telling you all about the first DirectX 11 compatible GPU, that's crammed with over 2 billion transistors, produced using an advanced 40nm process, would get you all worked up into the kind of frenzy that a no pithy intro could. So, feast your eyes on the Radeon HD 5870, check out the specs and features below, and read on for full scoop on AMD's latest flagship GPU. Just don't get too worked up, too quickly. We want you to make it all the way to the end without passing out...

AMD Radeon HD 5870 DirectX 11 Graphics Card

AMD ATI Radeon HD 5870 Specifications and Features

2.15 billion 40nm transistors TeraScale 2 Unified Processing Architecture 1600 Stream Processing Units 80 Texture Units 128 Z/Stencil ROP Units 32 Color ROP Units GDDR5 Memory Interface Up To 153.6GB/sec of memory bandwidth PCI Express 2.1 x16 bus interface DirectX 11 support Shader Model 5.0 DirectCompute 11 Programmable hardware tessellation unit Accelerated multi-threading HDR texture compression Order-independent transparency OpenGL 3.2 support Image quality enhancement technology Up to 24x multi-sample anti-aliasing Super-sample anti-aliasing modes Adaptive anti-aliasing 16x angle independent anisotropic texture filtering 128-bit floating point HDR rendering ATI Eyefinity Advanced multi-display technology Three independent display controllers Drive three displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls, and video overlays Display grouping Combine multiple displays to behave like a single large display ATI Stream acceleration technology OpenCL 1.0 compliant DirectCompute 11 Double precision floating point processing support Accelerated video encoding, transcoding, and upscaling Native support for common video encoding instructions ATI CrossFireX multi-GPU technology Dual, triple, and quad GPU scaling Dual-channel bridge interconnect

ATI Avivo HD Video & Display technology UVD 2 dedicated video playback accelerator Advanced post-processing and scaling Dynamic contrast enhancement and color correction Brighter whites processing (blue stretch) Independent video gamma control Dynamic video range control Support for H.264, VC-1, and MPEG-2 Dual-stream 1080p playback support DXVA 1.0 & 2.0 support Integrated dual-link DVI output with HDCP Max resolution: 2560x1600 Integrated DisplayPort output Max resolution: 2560x1600 Integrated HDMI 1.3 output with Deep Color, xvYCC wide gamut support, and high bit-rate audio Max resolution: 1920x1200 Integrated VGA output Max resolution: 2048x1536 3D stereoscopic display/glasses support Integrated HD audio controller Output protected high bit rate 7.1 channel surround sound over HDMI with no additional cables required Supports AC-3, AAC, Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio formats ATI PowerPlay power management technology Dynamic power management with low power idle state Ultra-low power state support for multi-GPU configurations Certified drivers for Windows 7, Vista, and XP Speeds & Feeds Engine clock speed: 850 MHz Processing power (single precision): 2.72 TeraFLOPS Processing power (double precision): 544 GigaFLOPS Polygon throughput: 850M polygons/sec Data fetch rate (32-bit): 272 billion fetches/sec Texel fill rate (bilinear filtered): 68 Gigatexels/sec Pixel fill rate: 27.2 Gigapixels/sec Anti-aliased pixel fill rate: 108.8 Gigasamples/sec Memory clock speed: 1.2 GHz Memory data rate: 4.8 Gbps Memory bandwidth: 153.6 GB/sec Maximum board power: 188 Watts Idle board power: 27 Watts

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Radeon HD 5800 Series Design Goals...

A few of the design goals AMD / ATI set when the Radeon HD 5870 was still in the design phase are outlined on the slides above. Of course, a lot of groundwork had to be laid over the years before the company could produce such a product. As the above list of specifications and features show, the new Radeon HD 5870 is quite advanced in comparison to other current GPU products. But the chip does leverage technologies already implemented in previously released GPUs--it's not all new.  As such, we'd recommend perusing some recent HotHardware articles to brush up on a few of the technologies and features employed by the new Radeon HD 5870...

• ATI Radeon HD 4890: The RV790 Unveiled
• ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 - AMD Back On Top
• ATI Radeon HD 4850 and 4870: RV770 Has Arrived
• ATI Radeon HD 3870 and 3850: 55nm RV670
• ATI Catalyst Driver Analysis: CrossFireX and More
• AMD Hybrid CrossFire Sneak Peek

The articles listed above cover many of the features available with the Radeon HD 5870, like CrossFire, the UVD 2 video engine, Catalyst Control Center, PowerPlay, GDDR5 memory, and more. There are, however, a lot of brand new things being introduced with the Radeon 5800 series that we plan to cover on the pages ahead. So strap in as we take the most advanced GPU released to date for a spin through the the labs--we promise you won't be disappointed.