Last month AMD invited MyGaming to attend its “Next Generation Technology Summit” to be held in London in the second week of September. Without telling us exactly what the conference was about, we optimistically guessed that it had something to do with the launch of its next generation graphics hardware, then codenamed Cypress.
We guessed right, and were pleased to learn that the event was actually the official launch of what we can now reveal to be the HD 5800 series of graphics cards. Although information on the HD 5800 series has been under embargo until today, due to leaks it is no secret that AMD has been readying the launch of the HD 5850 and HD 5870 graphics cards.
The conference saw various AMD spokespeople talking about the peripheral technologies that will accompany the new chipset. Representatives kept making comments suggesting that GPU performance and power are not the only things that the HD5800 series will focus on, which was a bit worrying to anyone who cares about high-end gaming. Things like smooth HD video playback, easy transcoding, stream computing and Eyefinity took up a lot of the presentation time.
Our concerns however were put to rest upon the unveiling on the new GPU’s specs which officially confirmed the new 40nm die shrink, as well as the 2+ billion transistor count, 1600 stream processors and 2.72 TFLOP compute performance.
Official HD 5800 specs
In terms of raw processing power the HD 5870 is the most powerful GPU ever made. At just under 3TFLOPS, with 32 ROPS and a memory bandwidth of 153.6GB/s, never has a single GPU been able to boast such impressive specifications.
While the card does have a higher peak power draw of 188W, it is able to drop down to just 27W at idle, representing the lowest idle power consumption ever boasted by a high-end graphics card.
Pricing roadmap
From today onwards international retailers will begin stocking the HD 5850 and HD 5870. Those familiar with previous AMD HD products will be familiar with the setup. Like the award winning HD 4850, the HD 5850 will target mid-range-high-end users, while the HD 5870 will become AMD’s flagship high-end performance graphics card.
Later on this year AMD will launch “Hemlock”, which is the codename for the dual-GPU HD 5870. This will most probably come just before the holiday season and will serve to boost the product range after the initial launch.
Later on AMD will launch “Redwood” and “Cedar”, its entry level HD 5000 series GPU.
The HD 5850 will launch internationally at $300 (R2200) and the HD 5870 will launch at $400 (R2900).
Local pricing and availability
The HD 5850 will retail locally for R2699 and the HD 5870 will sell for R3999.
The HD 5870 will officially launch in SA at next week’s rAge expo which kicks off on the first week of October.
The HD 5850 will appear at retail the following week.
DirectX 11
AMD is marketing the HD 5800 series heavily in conjunction with the imminent launch of Windows 7 and DX11. AMD acknowledged at the conference that Windows Vista and DX10 had their problems, but they feel confident that users will adopt Windows 7 along with DX11 at a much healthier rate.
A number of image quality enhancements have reportedly been made in DX11, and lead developers currently working on Aliens Vs Predator as well as Dirt 2 for PC discussed how DX11 is allowing them to make better looking games than ever. STALKER: Call of Pripyat is another confirmed DX11 game that is in development, and a DX11 version of Battleforge will also be released shortly after the launch of DX11.
Having a consistent supply of DX11 titles following the launch of the new API is obviously key to getting PC gamers to adopt the new technology early on, and AMD informed us that there are a number of big name titles being developed for DX11 that cannot yet be revealed.
Performance
We received an engineering sample HD 5870 for testing purposes at the conference. Early performance figures using the beta drivers put the card at about 15% faster on average than two HD 4870s running in Crossfire.
While some games, such as Far Cry 2 saw a mammoth performance boost of around 100% over the Crossfire set up, others such as Crysis Warhead saw a more modest 20% improvement.
With a lot more testing to be done using the official drivers which will be released today, we expect official performance figures to indicate substantial improvements over the HD 4870. Using the beta drivers we experienced roughly double the framerates with the HD 5870 over the single HD 4870. As usual performance is expected to improve substantially as drivers mature.
A full review of the HD 5870 will be up in the next few days.
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