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XFX Radeon HD 5870 first glimpse

by on23 September 2009

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Preview: Much faster than last gen



We got a chance to do a quick preliminary round of tests on Radeon HD 5870 and since our samples only arrived today, we didn’t have the chance to test it out as meticulously as we would've liked. We will of course soon come out with a full-blown review but for now here is a glimpse of what the XFX HD 5870 1GB is capable of.

Thanks to XFX we can show you at least a bit of what this card is all about. Since it has 2.15 billion transistors, the HD 5870's ticker we like to call RV870 offers twice as much Shaders - 1600 in total. TMUs got a boost to 80 and the ROPs got up from 16 on the 48x0 generation to 32. In a way, the RV870 chip can be viewed as a single chip that has the power of two RV770 cores inside. This is not all though, as the chip is 40nm, the transistors are smaller, it supports up to three Eyefinity multi-displays with one regular card, and of course it comes with Shader model 5.0 and DirectX 11 support.

This is a lot of innovation indeed but it still leaves a feeling that this chip is more evolution than revolution.

Microsoft plans to launch Windows 7 in just about a month time and this will be the DirectX 11's official birthday. The card supports the not-so-successful Stream parallel computing from AMD as well as OpenCL, open standard computing language.

AMD is however still a lot more concentrated on gaming and will continue in that direction. XFX HD 5870 1GB card runs at default 850MHz core clock, 1200MHz GDDR5 256 bit memory and it packs one serious punch.

XFX ships the card with Dirt 2 voucher, one Crossfire Interconnect Cable, DVI to VGA Adaptor and two 6 PIN to 4 PIN Power Cable. The suggested retail price in the US is $379 while in Europe it is €329 and UK around £300 if not more.

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We had just enough time to test FarCry 2 game and a couple of Futuremak tests.

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You can see the advantage of HD 5870 over HD 4870 X2 in the Vantage Extreme test, but note that the older dual GPU card is still better in most of games.

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At certain resolutions in Far Cry 2, the new fastest single GPU Radeon 5870 leaves the best single GPU Nvidia's offering, the GTX 285 in the dust and wins with up to 21fps better results.

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Last modified on 23 September 2009
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