Radeon HD 5850 & 5870 Pictures And Benchmarks

Technology details, six monitors support et al.

AMD has presented it's graphics cards to the press in the USS Hornet aircraft carrier last Friday. Some details have surfaced, including those of a Radeon 5800 card that supports output to six monitors, aptly named Radeon HD 5870 Six:

Picture courtesy of PC Perspective

This new multi display technology is named EyeFinity and is implemented just right. The technology allows you to configure the six monitors to appear to Windows as just one with the aggregate resolution, allowing for easier support in games - or in most of them.



Don't be fooled though, if you think you can get away with doing that with cheap monitors. You need monitors with proper viewing angles - based on IPS, PVA or MVA panels - and not your standard $150 monitor. Otherwise, you will definitely not enjoy the experience.

What AMD didn't presented though, were specs and benchmarks, which have been leaked by other means. Shader count for the new GPU was already rumored before to be 1600, or double of what exists in the RV770, Radeon 4800 series chips, and that has now been confirmed by several websites. This slide is from ATI-Forum:


The card itself seems to lack bandwidth compared with the massive theoretical peak performance of 2.72TFLOPs/s, as it is only of 153.6GB/s, less than what Nvidia has in the GTX 285(159GB/s). That doesn't stop it from being fast, very fast, especially on some benchmarks:


The Radeon HD 5870 is faster by 55%, on average, although it does show some lower results here and there. Less bandwidth bound games perform remarkably well, driven by the enormous amount of processing power. The card is consistently faster or similar in performance to the dual GPU based HD 4870X2. The card seems to be seriously lacking in bandwidth, despite the good performance. Expect versions with overclocked memory to show up soon enough.

The 5870 also had it's TMUs and ROPs doubled to 80 and 32 respectively, when compared with the Radeon 4870 and the clock of the GPU is 850MHz with the GDDR5 memory at 4.8GHz. Its price is expected to be $399, getting lower progressively, similar to what happened with the HD 4870/4850. Hence the "< $400", as shown in the slide above, instead of a fix price point. The Radeon HD 5850 will be launched at less than $300 and will offer similar performance to the GeForce GTX 285. Its clock is lower at 725MHz and a shader cluster is disabled, yielding 1440 shaders and 72TMUs with the memory clocked at only 4GHz(GDDR5 also).
Equal in both GPUs is the idle power consumption, terrific at just 27W, as you've probably noticed in the slide from AMD.

Chiphell, notable for it's earlier leaks, has a diagram of the core, although it's still unconfirmed if this is really how the core is designed:


The diagram shows two blocks of 800 SPs, which would mean AMD could have just stuck two RV770 SIMD blocks together and added some featrues. The numbers do add up, but this is still pending confirmation from AMD. The chip, as we can see from the pictures, measures around 350mm², so it's not very expensive to produce and sits in the territory of the G92 chip, which spawned many cards at $200-$250. AMD can introduce a cheaper card with less shaders after the 5850 and 5870 without loosing money.

The cards are expected to hit retail in September 23rd. Nvidia has not showed any cards and seems to be quite late with the upcoming GT300. Right now, everything is looking up for AMD, the card looks great, it's the first to support DX 11 and even the Radeon HD 5850 will be a formidable opponent to the GTX 285 while being cheaper by $50 on average.