Why

Submitted by MeTo on Thu, 08/20/2009 - 9:02am

With win7 just around the corner i will have to wait. If i had to make a choice right now i would go for the ATI.

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cool

Submitted by joeyjr on Wed, 08/19/2009 - 11:25am

RV870 to become Radeon HD 5870 with 1200 shaders?
Written by Andreas G 27 April 2009 20:59

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AMD is fully aware that details on the coming GT300 from NVIDIA implies something phat coming. AMD may not have restructured its graphics design in an equally drastic manner, but it has time on its side. AMD is hoping to deliver RV870 chip in late summer and perhaps as early as July. German site Hardware-infos has published some new rumors on AMD's RV870 chip, which seems to confirm the names HD 5870 and HD 5870 X2.

If we move on to the actual graphics processor there are some substantial improvements over the RV770/790 chips. AMD hasn't just expanded the number of shaders from 800 to 1200, it also increased the number of texture units to 48 [Editor's note: should 60 if the scaling is linear] and doubled the number of ROPs from 16 with RV770 to 32 with RV870. Not to forget the support for DirectX 11.

The site also published a table that specifies the clock frequencies AMD will use with its new 40nm GPUs and it also reveals some bits on the theoretical performance.

                            HD 4870         HD 4870 X2          HD 5870            HD 5870 X2
 
GPU clock              750 MHz        2x 750 MHz           900 MHz             2x 950 MHz
Memory clock         900 MHz        2x 900 MHz         1100 MHz            2x 1150 MHz
Performance      1200 Gflops     2x 1200 Gflops    2160 Gflops       2x 2280 Gflops
Texture fillrate     25.000 MT/s    2x 25.000 MT/s    43.200 MT/s      2x 45.600 MT/s
Pixel fillrate        10.000 MP/s     2x 10.000 MP/s    28.800 MP/s      2x 30.400 MP/s
Bandwidth           115,2 GB/s      2x 115,2 GB/s      140,8 GB/s        2x 147,2 GB/s

With 50% more shader units and higher clock frequencies, and perhaps tuned shaders too, it comes as no surprise that the performance will be reflected by that. Radeon HD 5870 will deliver 2160 Gflops, which is close to twice that of HD 4870.

Considering the pixel performance we see that the extra ROPs almost triple performance, which together with a higher clocked GDDR5 memory should result in some real pixel spraying mayhem.

Interestingly but perhaps not surprisingly, Radeon HD 5870 X2 looks to become a real beast, not just because they will get two RV870 chips on the same card, but also a frequency boost of 50MHz each.

We have no confirmation on these numbers and urge you to consider them with salt, but if AMD can get its RV870 GPU out by summer it is going to be one exciting fall waiting for NVIDIA to release its GT300.

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Related news:
2009-08-11 Radeon HD 4860, 4750 exclusive to China
2009-08-09 Radeon HD 4750 coming, sort of, soon
2009-08-08 The five flavors of GT300
2009-08-08 RV830(?) = RV770 +DirectX 11, X2 part to use SFR
2009-08-01 GT300 tapes out, launch in 2009 possible

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I've been waiting to

Submitted by thegamepro on Wed, 08/19/2009 - 9:17am

I've been waiting to upgrade my gpu but I'm waiting for the dx11 GPUs.  If these cards that were mentioned support dx11, I will upgrade when they are released. 

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BFG Step-Up

Submitted by StealthSilver on Wed, 08/19/2009 - 9:07am

Hopefully these will come out before November 26th, when my BFG step-up expires!

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