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ATI Mangles the Competition: 8 Hot New Video Cards Reviewed

Loyd Case — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:30:00 -0600

We burn up kilowatts testing eight hot new videocards to see why the Radeon reigns supreme

AMD’s recent release of its RV870 GPU line makes the company the undisputed graphics performance leader. The Radeon HD 5870 is the fastest single-GPU graphics card on the market currently. But at roughly $380, it’s not inexpensive, so AMD has also rolled out the Radeon HD 5850, 5770, and 5750 cards. All are DirectX 11–capable, at lower price points than the flagship HD 5870.

The HD 5850 uses the same RV870 GPU as the 5870, but with a couple of functional units disabled. Priced at around $260, the 5850 occupies the lower tier of the high-end cards. The recently released 5770/5750 cards use a different chip. Based on the same DirectX 11 architecture as their big brothers, the 5770/5750 are built with 1.04 billion transistors—just slightly more than the 956 million used in the previous-generation Radeon HD 4870/4890 products. Contrast these numbers with the 2.15 billion transistors in the Radeon HD 5870.

Current prices for 5770s are roughly the same as older 4870s, around $150–$160. So the 5770 is firmly positioned as a midrange graphics card.

We put eight cards to the test, from six companies: three Radeon HD 5870s, three HD 5850s, one HD 5770, and a factory-overclocked Nvidia GTX 260 from Gigabyte, our token Nvidia card in the mix. We compared each card against the fastest previous single-GPU champ, the EVGA 285 GTX SSC. Our test bed consisted of a 3.3GHz Intel Core i7-975 on an Asus Rampage Extreme II X58 motherboard, 6GB Corsair DDR3/1600 at 1,333MHz, a Seagate 7200.12 1TB hard drive, a Lite-On DVD+/-RW optical drive, a Corsair 850W PSU, and the 64-bit version of Windows 7.

At the start of any new GPU’s cycle, board vendors adhere to the reference design, making performance virtually identical among competing cards. This changes as OEMs tweak their designs. Still, as you’ll see from our reviews, differences exist in terms of warranty, software bundle, availability, and price.

At a Glance: ATI's New Line of GPUs

ATI Radeon GPUs

Model	HD 4870	HD 5770	HD 5750	HD 5850	HD 5870
Stream Processors	800	800	720	1440	1600
Core Clock	750MHz	850MHz	700MHz	725MHz	850MHz
Memory Clock	900MHz	1.2GHz	700MHz	1GHz	1.2GHz
Memory Width	256	128	128	256	256
Max Power Use	150W	108W	86W	151W	188W
Price	$150	$160	$130	$260	$380

All these have 1GB of memory; there’s also a 512MB version of the 5750 available, at around $110.

The Reviews (Click the picture or headline for the full review and benchmarks, and verdict)

XFX Radeon HD 5870

All of the Radeon HD 5870s reviewed here are essentially identical—they’re the fastest single-GPU graphics cards you can buy currently. Out of the box, you get a typical one-year limited warranty. But if you register XFX’s product online. within 30 days of purchase, the warranty lasts for “the duration of your life.” Not a bad deal, assuming the company is around that long.

HIS Radeon HD 5870

HIS is based in Hong Kong, but its cards are readily available in U.S. outlets. They often cost slightly less than the competition, but that’s not the case with the company’s Radeon HD 5870, which is priced the same as its competitors. When we first unpacked the card, we thought it was the lesser HD 5850 model, due to its relatively compact packaging.

Sapphire Radeon HD 5870

As with all Radeon HD 5870s, Sapphire’s version offers superlative performance, making it one of the fastest single-GPU cards available today. At its core is AMD’s 2.15 billion transistor Cypress chip, coupled with 1GB of 1,200MHz GDDR5 memory. Two DVI, one HDMI, and one DisplayPort connection allow for flexible monitor attachment.

More reviews on the next page!

Asus EAH5850

All of the Radeon cards tested here are based on AMD’s reference design, including this Asus card. However, Asus includes Smart Doctor software, which allows you to easily overclock its card.

Diamond Radeon HD 5850

We admit to mixed feelings about Diamond’s Radeon HD 5850. On one hand, it offers the same strong performance as other Radeon HD 5850 cards—second only to their big-brother HD 5870 cards. But unlike other manufacturers, you don’t get a coupon for Dirt 2 in the box. Instead, you need to register the card at Diamond’s website to get the perk. You also won’t get the two-year warranty unless you register the card.

Sapphire Radeon HD 5850

As with Sapphire’s Radeon HD 5870, the company’s HD 5850 card ships with coupons for two games: Dirt 2 and Battlestations: Pacific. Sapphire’s HD 5850 delivers a stock Radeon HD 5850, with its 1,440 stream processors, 72 texture units, and DirectX 11 support.

Gigabyte 260 GTX Super OC

It’s easy to be seduced by the latest and greatest graphics cards, but you can sometimes find excellent deals in older-generation cards that can still keep up with today’s shader-heavy PC games. Gigabyte’s 260 GTX SuperOC is a good example.

To make the cards, Gigabyte starts with cherry-picked 260 GTX chips from the factory.

HIS Radeon HD 5770

AMD has wasted no time bringing its DirectX 11 GPU architecture to a more affordable, mainstream-class GPU in the HD 5770. HIS is one of the first manufacturers to bring the HD 5770 to market.

At around $160, the card is priced similarly to existing Radeon HD 4870 cards. It’s the lowest-cost card in the roundup, and given the 180mm2 die size (that’s incredibly tiny for a GPU), prices are likely to eventually come down even further.

Next: Tools to Boost Your Graphics Card Performance

Tools to Boost Your Graphics Card Performance

The Asus EAH5850 might be the only card here to ship with the Smart Doctor software tool for overclocking, but the fact is, you can overclock any of the graphics cards in this roundup.

AMD’s own Catalyst software suite that’s installed with the Radeon drivers has a built-in overclocking control panel known as Overdrive.

While you can’t tweak the voltage—something that’s fairly dangerous, anyway—you can set GPU and memory clocks, manually control your fans, and use Overdrive’s auto-tune feature to try to automatically set higher clock speeds. Our experience with auto-tune is that it’s fairly conservative; we were able to boost core clocks from 850MHz to 890MHz, and memory clocks from 1,200MHz to a scant 1,230MHz. When you click auto-tune, expect to wait about 15–20 minutes for the process to complete.

Nvidia also lets you overclock cards based on its GPUs, but you have to work at it a little. First, you need to download the Nvidia System Tools software from here. Look for the link “Nvidia System Tools with ESA support.”

Download and install System Tools. You can do this even if you don’t have an Nvidia-based motherboard. An additional panel is installed in the Nvidia graphics control panel, allowing you to manage clock speeds.

As with AMD’s Overdrive, Nvidia’s tool has an auto-tune feature.

Third-party apps also exist for overclocking graphics cards. Probably the most popular graphics overclocking tool is RivaTuner, which works with both ATI- and Nvidia-based cards. You can find RivaTuner at Guru3D. Currently, RivaTuner hasn’t been updated to work with the 5800 series. Also, you may have issues with 64-bit Vista and Windows 7, due to its use of an unsigned driver.

Making the Most of Multiple Monitors

Eyefinity is AMD’s moniker for the Radeon HD 5000 series’ ability to connect to multiple displays. Even the lowest-cost Radeon HD 5750 offers four display connections; you can use any three of them simultaneously. Note that if you use more than two displays, one must be DisplayPort capable—but you can use an active DisplayPort-to-DVI adapter to connect a third display via that monitor’s DVI port.

Of course, the HD 5000 cards support standard Windows multiple-display capability, so you can clone or extend a display if you have more than one attached. But Eyefinity takes this a step further, by enabling you to create monitor groups. If all the displays in a monitor group are the same resolution, then you can configure the driver to see all of them as one large surface.

Three 1680x1050-pixel panels can therefore be configured as a single 5040x1050 panel in a three-wide configuration. Or, you could configure them as a single 1680x3150 stacked display. When you do this, games and apps see the group as a single display. Not all games will necessarily look correct—you’ll probably need to manually tweak the field of view, for example. Note that the panels don’t have to be the same physical size, but they do need to have identical resolutions.

If you don’t have three monitors of the same resolution, you can still use Eyefinity groups—you just can’t configure the group to be a single surface. We used three displays—a 2560x1600 monitor with DisplayPort and two DVI-equipped 1920x1200 24-inch panels. The two 24-inchers were set up in portrait (tall) mode, so they were seen as 1200x1920 displays. The 30-inch Dell 3008WFP was set up in landscape (wide).

While you can use Eyefinity with two displays, it’s a far better gaming experience with three, particularly in games with a targeting reticule or similar feature. With two displays, the reticule is split over the center bezels. That makes aiming a little chancy in fast-paced shooters.

ATI HD Radeon 5870: The Fastest Videocard Ever (PS It's $380)

Loyd Case — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 11:30:00 -0500

AMD packs 2.15 billion transistors into a tiny chip, offering outstanding performance, DirectX 11 support, and triple-monitor (or better) capability. Nvidia’s response is nowhere to be seen

AMD’s graphics division, the former ATI Technologies, loves a good surprise. The company has been a perennial also-ran in the graphics performance arena, but every now and then, it one-ups the competition in a big way. That happened back in 2002, with the launch of the original Radeon 9700, which stole the performance lead from archrival Nvidia. It happened again last year, with the Radeon HD 4800 series. The 4850, 4870, and 4890 weren’t always faster than the competition, but they were small, efficient chips that forced Nvidia into a price war that was good for users but bad for Nvidia’s bottom line.

Now AMD’s doing it again, putting some serious hurt on the competition with the first GPU to support Microsoft’s upcoming DirectX 11 API. AMD’s also been paying close attention to the emerging market for non-gaming apps accelerated by GPUs, such as video transcoding and digital photography, fully supporting DirectCompute 11 and OpenCL standards for general purpose computing on graphics cards.

This new chip is no shrinking violet in the numbers department. Every number associated with the new Radeon 5800 series is staggering: 2.15 billion transistors, 2.7 trillion floating-point operations a second, more than 20 gigapixels per second throughput, 1,600 shader units. Other numbers impress because of their smallness. One example: The idle power is a scant 27W— lower than many entry level GPUs.

Given the sheer scale and ambition of this GPU, does it deliver in the performance realm? And will it deliver at a price normal humans can afford? Let’s find out.

Digging into the Radeon HD 5870

At its core is a no-compromise GPU more efficient than any in graphics history

Two years ago, AMD’s ATI division decided to bow out of the game of building huge, hot chips that were expensive to make, ceding the high-end glory to Nvidia’s GT200 chip. That’s not to say AMD gave up on performance; it instead adopted the mantra of building the best performance GPU within a certain cost and power envelope. The Radeon HD 5800 series, originally code-named RV870, is the culmination of that approach. Taking advantage of Moore’s Law, ATI’s designers were able to build a GPU with few compromises using a 40nm manufacturing process.

Radeon GPUs Compared

Radeon HD 4890 vs 5870

	Radeon HD 4890	Radeon HD 5870
Die Size	263mm-squared	334mm-squared
Transistor Count	956 million	2.15 billion
CPU Clock	850MHz	850MHz
Memory Clock	975MHz	1200MHz
Memory Quantity (GDDR5)	1GB	1GB
Manufacturing Process	55nm	40nm
Stream Processors	800	1600
Texture Units	40	80
ROPs	16	32
Maximum Board Power (TDP)	160W	188W
Idle Power	90W	27W

Power and Performance

The new GPU is just 334mm2—30 percent larger than the earlier 4870 GPU, but packing more than twice the number of transistors.

At 27W, the idle power is astonishingly low for such a large chip. The key factor was enabling lower memory clocks and voltages during idle, a feat made possible because of significant improvements in the 40nm manufacturing process. The net result is very low power when the board is just rendering your Windows desktop. At the same time, the VRM (voltage regulator module) interface has been improved, preventing overheating while allowing somewhat higher power consumption when performance is actually needed.

So the HD 5870 can draw less power while it’s doing nothing. But we also expect to see better performance, particularly given some of the other specs listed by ATI. The faster memory gives the 5870 overall memory bandwidth of 153GB/s. Feeding that huge pipe is a GPU with twice as much hardware where it matters—stream processors, ROPs, and texture units.

The graphics engine itself sports some new features—particularly the hardware tessellation engine. While past ATI products have offered hardware tessellation, the new engine fully supports Microsoft’s DirectX 11 tessellation API. ATI is fond of pointing out that this is actually its sixth generation tessellation hardware.

Texture Units and Caches

Having a robust set of shaders gives the Radeon 5870 unparalleled computational performance, but games still make heavy use of textures. Previous Radeons have been criticized for having fewer texture units and ROPs (raster operations in the render back-ends) than the competition. ATI has responded by doubling the number of texture units, from 40 to 80. The ROPs have also been doubled. The result is a theoretical doubling of throughput to 68 billion bilinear filtered texels per second.

The L2 cache sizes have been increased to 128KB to facilitate the additional throughput generated by the increased number of texture units. Raw cache performance has also been improved, upping the L1 texture fetch bandwidth to one terabyte per second. Each SIMD engine has dedicated L1 cache, and the bandwidth between these exclusive caches and the shared L2 cache is 435GB/s. Also, maximum texture size has been increased to 16k x 16k, to support DirectX 11.

Image Quality

In the past, we’ve found that Radeon GPU’s texture filtering was inferior to the equivalent Nvidia GPUs. AMD’s graphics architects took those criticisms to heart and redesigned the texture filtering units. The key is a new anisotropic filtering algorithm that no longer depends on the angle of view. This new, high-quality anisotropic filtering comes with no performance hit when compared to the older method.

The combination of raw compute horsepower, improved filtering algorithms, and double the texture units also gives the RV870 incredible antialiasing performance. AMD estimates the performance hit from going to 8x AA from 4x AA ranges from just a couple percentage points to less than 20 percent. All that graphics performance on tap has allowed AMD to implement supersampling antialiasing, something it had removed a few years back.

DirectX 11 on Tap

The Radeon HD 5800 chip implements all of DirectX 11 in hardware. This includes:

Hardware tessellation

This is the ability to generate geometry from an abstract description of the object defined by patches. Triangles can be interpolated within the patches, adding large amounts of geometric detail without the artist needing to explicitly create new artwork.

Shader Model 5.0

DirectX 11 now sports a unified shader language across all types of shaders: vertex, hull, domain, geometry, pixel, and the new compute shaders.

Object oriented programming model

The era of writing huge shader programs may be past. Instead, programmers can work in more familiar ways, creating shader objects that can be called by parent programs. It’s easier to write, document, and debug.

Order independent transparency

Previously, transparency was handled by alpha blending, or by the application doing expensive traversal of the geometry to understand the order of the triangles. Order independent transparency makes creating complex subjects with many transparent elements easier.

Multithreading

The DirectX API is fully multithreaded, and the drivers can now be more fully multithreaded, taking advantage of multicore CPUs. This feature will actually help speed up applications on older-generation GPUs, once DirectX 11 and new drivers are released.

DirectX 11 Compute

This is the new term for compute shaders. Now DirectX programmers have a standard interface for adding general purpose compute elements to games, such as physics, post-processing, and even alternative renderers, like ray tracing and radiosity rendering.

All these features are enabled in the RV870 hardware, making the new GPU the first fully compliant DirectX 11 graphics chip available.

GDDR5: Fast and Efficient Memory

Since the Radeon HD 5870 essentially doubles the computational power available for graphics, ATI needed a very fast memory subsystem. The new card uses GDDR5 memory running at 1,200MHz (effective), 225MHz faster than the same type of video RAM used on the older HD 4890. According to ATI, this now results in a balanced graphics card; the 4890 often was shader bound, meaning that available memory bandwidth went unused. The card itself also makes use of a GDDR5 feature called lower power strobe mode. This is part of what enables the 5870 to idle at a miserly 27W.

The Other Radeon: the HD 5850

When AMD shipped the first of the Radeon 4800 series, that card was the 4850. Later, the HD 4870 arrived on the scene. The only difference between the 4850 and the 4870 was the width (the 4850 was a single-wide card; the 4870 took two PCI slots), plus core and memory clock speeds.

The HD 5850 actually has a slightly different feature set than the 5870; ATI has left out one of the functional units. It’s the same chip, but with one of the SIMD engines disabled – what’s often called a “salvage” part. The clocks are also cut down a bit. So this time around, there is actually a difference in the two GPUs.

Radeon HD 5850 & 5870

	Radeon HD 5850	Radeon HD 5870
Transistor Count	2.15 Billion	2.15 Billion
Memory Clock	1000MHz	1200MHz
Memory Quantity (GDDR5)	1GB	1GB
Stream Processors	1440	1600
Texture Units	72	80
ROPs	32	32
Maximum Board Power (TDP)	170W	188W
Idle Power	27W	27W

The Price of Glory

The best news about the Radeon HD 5800 series is the pricing. Final pricing wasn’t available as we wrapped up the article, but AMD noted that the HD 5870’s target price is around $380, with the 5850 aimed at under the $300 mark.

While $380 is a lot of money for a high-end board, the era of shipping the most capable GPU on the planet in a $600 board seems to be over.

Radeon HD 5870 Crushes Nvidia’s 285 GTX

In our GPU cage match, AMD’s new graphics processor delivers a stunning KO against the heavily overclocked competition

It’s a classic graphics card cage match. In one corner, the feisty, but unproven newcomer; in the other corner glowers the grizzled veteran. The newcomer, of course, is AMD’s shiny new Radeon HD 5870, weighing in at 2.15 billion transistors. The grizzled veteran is Nvidia’s 285 GTX. But this is no ordinary 285 GTX. We pitted the Radeon against a souped-up EVGA 285 GTX SSC.

The 285 GTX SSC runs its core clock at 702MHz, more than eight percent faster than the stock 648MHz; the memory clock is pumped up to 1,323MHz, about 6.5 percent faster than the base. In other words, it’s about the fastest Nvidia-based, single-chip graphics card you can get.

The newcomer is AMD’s spiffy new Radeon HD 5870. With an 850MHz engine clock and 1,200MHz GDDR5 clock, AMD’s new progeny looks like it has the chops to take on Nvidia. But we’ve been disappointed by promising GPUs from AMD’s graphics division in the past.

Not this time.

We tested three cards (also tossing in AMD’s previous best, the Radeon HD 4890) in a Core i7 975 system with 6GB of RAM, running on an Asus Rampage II X58 motherboard. All that CPU horsepower is to ensure that the benchmarks stress the graphics card, rather than be held back by CPU or RAM. We used Windows 7 Ultimate RTM as the OS.

After the smoke cleared, the 285 GTX looked like a tired fighter who’d been rope-a-doped and KO’d. The performance differences aren’t minor, they’re huge: The Radeon HD 5870 was 63 percent faster in Crysis, 32 percent faster in Far Cry 2, 33 percent faster in STALKER, and even 24 percent faster in Battleforge, an RTS that’s arguably more dependent on CPU than graphics.

This round of the endless GPU wars, then, is clearly owned by AMD, at least for single-GPU cards. And with performance like this, who wants the heat and power consumption of a dual-GPU card.

On the other hand, we won’t count Nvidia out. While Nvidia’s current high end is now relegated to the status of also-rans, the company is slaving away on its DirectX 11 GPU, code-named GT300. When that ships, expect a rematch.

BENCHMARKS

GPU	Radeon HD 4890	EVGA GTX 285 SSC	Radeon HD 5870
Crysis (FPS)	22	22	36
Far Cry 2 (FPS)	51	56	74
STALKER Clear Sky (FPS)	24	27	36
BattleForge (FPS)	36	46	57
3DMark Vantage Performance (Score)	12128	13941	17032
3DMark Vantage Extreme (Score)	6276	4955	8252
Idle System Power (W)	160	142	119
Full Load System Power (W)	363	307	293

Best scores are bolded. All benchmarks run at 1920x1200 with 4x AA enabled and all graphics settings maxed out unless otherwise specified. Full load system power was taken during a 3DMark Vantage run at 2560x1600 with extreme settings.

Six Monitors, One Card

One of the more intriguing aspects of the Radeon HD 5870 is its use of multiple displays, something AMD dubs “Eyefinity.” The first shipping HD 5870 comes with four display connectors: two DVI, one DisplayPort, and one HDMI. Up to three monitors can be connected to any three of the four connectors. (Due to timing limitations, all four connectors can’t be used simultaneously.) Later this year, AMD will ship a card with six DisplayPort adapters, capable of connecting up to six DisplayPort-equipped monitors at the same time.

For cards supporting up to three displays, usage scenarios might include three wide screen displays in portrait mode, side by side. Cards capable of driving six simultaneous digital monitors could support a variety of display options: 3 x 2 landscape, 2 x 2, or oddball scenarios such as 3 x 1 with another 1 on top as an extended display (for flight sims, for example.)

One underlying technology making a six display configuration possible is DisplayPort. The display controller in the RV870 generates only two timing signals, suitable for DVI or VGA. DisplayPort can source external timing signals, and DisplayPort-equipped monitors can act as timing sources.

GPGPU: GPU Compute Comes of Age

Using graphics chips for general purpose computing is still a pretty new concept. AMD notes that the trend is increasingly towards apps that operate on large amounts of data in parallel on a single application. On the other hand, traditional CPUs are geared toward high performance with applications that crunch data serially.

Video transcoding, photo and video effects filters, plus tools like noise reduction and image cleanup have a ravenous appetite for parallel floating-point compute power.The HD 5870 offers up to 2.7 trillion single-precision floating-point operations per second and up to 544 billion double-precision FP operations every second. To put that in context, Intel’s fastest CPU today, the Core i7 975, is capable of about 85 billion FLOPs . Floating-point calculations are now IEEE 754-compliant, which makes life easier for application developers and end users.

AMD built in the hooks to make the 5800 series a better general purpose compute engine than past Radeons. This includes full hardware implementation of OpenCL and DirectCompute 11, IEEE 754-2008 floating-point compliance, better memory handling for general applications, and global synchronization and data sharing.

While Nvidia has been pushing its proprietary CUDA architecture hard over the past several years, only a handful of consumer-level applications have really taken advantage of GPU compute. But now we have two emerging standards, both with strong organizations backing them: OpenCL and DirectCompute.

OpenCL development is coordinated and tested by the Khronos Group, which is also responsible for the OpenGL graphics standard. OpenCL is available on a variety of operating systems, including Windows, MacOS, and Linux. DirectCompute is part of Microsoft’s DirectX 11 API and fully supports the unified Shader Model 5 language.

Now that two strong standards have taken root, we’ll likely see GPU computing move beyond its proprietary and experimental roots. Upcoming DirectX 11 games will use DirectCompute for physics, deferred shading, and graphics post-processing. Companies like CyberLink are building consumer video and photo editing applications around OpenCL, moving away from CUDA and embracing standards.

Anatomy of a Thread Processor

With each succeeding generation, games are making heavier user of programmable shaders. It’s no wonder AMD and its competition are increasingly focusing on this key aspect of the GPU. At the heart of the beast that is the HD 5870 programmable engine are thread processors.

The thread processors, consisting of four stream cores and support units, were redesigned, streamlining some key instructions, adding DirectX 11 bit-level operations, and implementing a fused multiply-add capability. All of these increase the number of instructions per clock cycle for each thread processor; the 5870 has five stream cores (including the special functions core) for each thread processor, 16 thread processors per SIMD engine, of which there are 20, for a total of 320 thread processors and 1,600 stream cores. The SIMD engine is the smallest logical functional unit, and it’s likely that future DirectX 11 GPUs will pare the GPU at the SIMD engine level to build lower cost cards.

Each thread processor consists of four stream cores and one special function core, a branch unit, and a number of general purpose registers. The four stream cores together can pump out four 32-bit floating-point multiply-adds per clock cycle, or generate a pair of FP multiplies. AMD also implemented a math feature called Sum of Absolute Differences , which is useful in video encoding and computer vision applications. A variety of DirectX 11 bit-level operations are also built in.

Six Monitors, One Video Card. Hands-On with AMD's Eyefinity

Will Smith — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 17:00:00 -0500

Today’s graphics cards can barely handle one 30-inch monitor in gaming. Pushing around 2560x1600 pixels is a challenge for current-generation GPUs. While it’s true that each new generation of graphics cards can push performance, we weren’t quite prepared for the preview AMD gave us of its upcoming DirectX 11–capable graphics hardware.

AMD ushered us into its Sunnyvale, CA, test lab, where it had a high-end system set up with a single graphics card. AMD would only disclose that the card had a single GPU, and was one of the company’s upcoming DirectX 11–capable chips—nothing about the amount of video RAM, clock speeds, or anything else. This particular graphics card also sported six DisplayPort connectors. Attached to each DisplayPort connector was a 30-inch Dell display. The whole affair was configured as a single, 7680x3200 monitor. That's 24.6 megapixels!

Sure, you say, you can hook up six monitors and run Windows… but can it do 3D?

The short answer: yes, in spades. We witnessed the flight sim XPlane 9 running at full resolution, as well as Far Cry 2. Also shown was the flying ship scene from 3DMark 2006, running at a full 7680x3200, at between 12 and 20 frames per second. Dubbed Eyefinity, the tech demo was an amazing tour de force, and we can’t wait to get our hands on one of those cards.

Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2

Will Smith — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:00:00 -0500

As a general rule, our belief is that pairing two slow-performing cards using SLI or CrossFire is a bad idea—you’re usually better off running a single faster card. However, the Radeon 4850 X2 delivers astounding performance compared to the single-GPU boards in its price range, spanking the Radeon 4870 and the GeForce GTX 280, with none of the pitfalls that have plagued dual-GPU boards in the past.

At the heart of the board is a pair of ATI’s RV770 GPUs running at 625MHz, just like the single-GPU in the 4850 boards. Each GPU features a full complement of 800 stream processors, which are connected to identical 1GB GDDR3 frame buffers running at 993MHz on a 256-bit bus. Although X2 boards are labeled as featuring 2GB of memory, because the contents of each GPU’s frame buffer must be mirrored, applications can utilize only 1GB of video memory.

Like its 4870-powered predecessor, the 4850 X2 sports ATI’s advanced video decode acceleration, allowing you to view fully accelerated picture-in-picture Blu-ray discs. It’s fully compatible with multiple-monitor displays, and we love that this board features four DVI ports for multi-mon madness.

In our performance testing, the 4850 X2 unseated the fastest single-GPU videocards, the GeForce GTX 280 and Radeon HD 4870, in almost every benchmark. The exception to the rule was Crysis at high visual-quality settings and high resolution. When running at 1920x1200 with 4x antialiasing and the visual-quality settings cranked to Very High, we hit the 4850 X2’s memory bandwidth wall. Despite running at a higher clock speed than the 4870-family boards, the GDDR3 on the 4850 transfers half as much data per clock cycle.

With a street price that’s less than $300, the 4850 X2 is a great deal for owners of lower-resolution 22-inch monitors. However, if you use a 24-inch or 30-inch panel, it’s probably worth ponying up for a card with a peppier memory pipeline.

The Best of the Best Just Got Better

Florence Ion — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 18:22:54 -0600

Stop the presses! (Ok, maybe not). We wanted to let you know that Best of the Best, our comprehensive list of our favorite PC hardware components, has just been updated and overhauled with new categories and parts that you’ll need to consider for your next PC build or upgrade.

In addition to three new processor categories (Extreme, $500, and $250), we’ve listed our pick for the top Core i7 motherboard. The budget through high-end GPU lineup as also been refreshed, and we now make two hard drive recommendations based on performance and capacity.

Check it out!

EVGA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 Superclocked

Will Smith — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 12:43:08 -0600

When Nvidia unveiled its G200 GPU, we were immediately drawn to the shiny, speedy GeForce GTX 280. Why wouldn’t we be? With high core and memory clocks and 240 stream processors to churn through the toughest shaders, it was sexy and fast. We were less excited about the 260, which sported 192 stream processors and slower clocks speeds but cost about $100 less than the 280 (at the time). Since then, ATI has released its R700-based Radeon 4870, which outperforms the original 260 but costs the same amount.

And that’s where the Core 216 edition of the 260 GTX comes in. With the same stock clock speeds but 24 more shader processors than the original, the new version of the 260 GTX delivers comparable performance to the 4870 at a similar price. The speeds and feeds are about the same as the original 260’s, although EVGA clocked this card’s core at 626MHz (up from 576MHz stock) and includes 896MB of GDDR3 running on a 448-bit bus at 1053MHz (stock is 999MHz).

Aside from the additional shader processors, the Core 216 version of the GTX 260 is identical to the original. The card features all the video decoding and playback power of the GTX 280, including hardware-accelerated H.264 decoding to accelerate Blu-ray playback. Performance was about what we expected; the card delivered scores that were slower than a GeForce GTX 280’s but slightly faster than the 4870’s in shader-intensive games such as Crysis. We’re seeing significantly better performance with both Nvidia and ATI cards after recent driver releases, so we’ve rebenchmarked both the 4870 and GeForce GTX 280 to maintain an even playing field.

We’ve seen this card for less than $300 online already, which puts it firmly in the midrange category. You can find 512MB Radeon 4870 HDs, which are slightly faster, for less money online, but the GTX 260’s extra memory will likely help the card do better than the 512MB Radeons with games released in coming years. Of course, the 1GB 4870 boards are available for about $300, but unfortunately, we don’t have one in the Lab for comparison.

Sapphire Radeon 4870 X2

Will Smith — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 12:20:37 -0600

For a long time, we’ve considered videocards that sport two GPUs second-class citizens. They have all the problems of multi-card solutions—namely application incompatibilities and no multi-monitor support—but fail to perform as well as dual-card solutions, since multi-GPU cards usually use slower midrange GPUs. That’s finally changed with the new RV770-powered Radeon 4870 X2, which mounts two of ATI’s fastest GPUs on a single card, without sacrificing power-user features like multi-mon support.

The 4870 X2 is essentially two Radeon 4870 HD cards running in CrossFire mode packed onto a single board: The X2 has the same GPUs, the same 800 shader cores running at the same 750MHz core clock, and the same GDDR5 memory running at 900MHz. But, there is one difference. The single-GPU 4870 includes 512MB of memory, while the X2 has a whopping 2GB. However, the memory is duplicated between the two GPUs, so the effective frame buffer for the card is just 1GB. The X2 also features a high-speed PCI Express interconnect between the two GPUs, which should, theoretically, boost the efficiency of the shared GPUs. However, in our tests, we didn’t see an appreciable performance difference between a traditional CrossFire solution and the X2.

The 4870 X2 outperformed the previous single-card performance champ in most of our benchmarks, delivering playable frame rates at 1920x1200 and 2560x1600 in nearly every game we tested. Naturally, the exception remains Crysis, which, at its highest quality settings, punishes nearly every system we’ve tested. We’re slightly concerned about the accuracy of our Crysis benchmarks; the ATI card seemed to render far-off textures at a higher resolution than the Nvidia card. We’ll test further and report back next month.

As always with high-end cards, if you’re running a low-resolution display—pretty much anything below 1920x1200—you won’t be able to harness the full power of this card. At lower resolutions, the 4870 X2 performs exactly the same as the single-GPU 4870. For anyone running a high-res panel, the X2 truly kicks ass.
This card is a significant upgrade if your GPU doesn’t support DirectX 10—and is much better than some last-gen cards that do. If you’ve been waiting to make the jump to DX10, now’s the time to shell out the bucks—you won’t see a better performer for quite a while.

Asus Lays Claim to World's Most Intelligent Graphics Card

Chris Moody — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 07:48:41 -0500

Asus has laid claim to launching the world's most intelligent graphics card with the release of their ROG (Republic of Gamers) EN9600GT MATRIX/HTDI/512M. Asus goes on to say, “Much like a sci-fi movie where the protagonists can do just about anything, the ROG MATRIX Series will allow gamers to unleash the true power of graphics cards.” Can you smell the hype? I love the smell of hype in the morning.

The MATRIX card has the ASUS Super Hybrid Engine for automatic detection and adjustments of voltage, clock setting, and fan speeds to achieve “the ultimate in performance or maximum energy saving”. Additionally, the Hybrid Cooler technology offers extreme or silent cooling according to gamer needs. It includes their iTracker software to provide 5 scenario GUI modes for easy user selection of their preferred usage.

Asus goes on to claim that a 26% performance boost in 3D mode can be achieved; while 26% less power consumption and 0dB cooling can also be guaranteed under the 2D mode. It calculates all this on the fly making the adjustments in real time. Basically it sounds like automatic over/under clocking dependant on load.

The MATRIX’s Hybrid Cooler adjusts fan speed for load, ramping up fan RPMs when it needs cooling and lowering it when the card is not under stress to conserve power. I can dig the power savings aspect given today’s energy prices.

The card looks cool, it reads cool, it’s got some cool sounding names for its components, but I’m interested it how it performs. The hybrid cooler is neat, but my almost two year old laptop has been doing the same thing, it's not that exciting. Asus targeted this for the middle of the road market by using Nvidia’s 9600GT Chipset versus the GTX 260/280 series, or even the 9800 series. We’ll have to wait for shipping cards for an in-depth look to see if it lives up to being as intelligent as Asus claims it to be.

Specifications

Model	EN9600GT MATRIX/HTDI/512M
Graphics Engine	GeForce 9600GT
Video Memory	512M DDR3
Engine Clock	650 MHz
Shader Clock	1625MHz
Memory Clock	1.8GHz (900MHz DDR3)
Memory Interface	256 bit
DVI Max. Resolution	2560 * 1600
Bus Standard	PCI Express 2.0
DVI Output	DVI-I
HDCP compliant	YES
HDMI Output	YES**
D-Sub Output	YES, via DVI to D-Sub adaptor
HDTV Output	YES, via HDTV Out cable
TV Output	YES, via S-Video to Composite
Adaptor/Cable Bundled	DVI-to-D-Sub adaptor HDTV-out cable Power Cable
Software Bundled	ASUS Utilities & Driver
Notes	The card size is 4.376 inches x 9 inches