AMD ATi has announced its brand new top of the range graphics card; the HD 5970. The new HD 5970 is essentially two HD 5870 GPUs strapped onto one board. When asked why the card is not called the HD 5870X2 like previous dual GPU AMD products, an AMD representative stated that the HD 5970 is more than just a dual GPU HD 5870.
On paper the HD 5970 is the most powerful graphics card in the world. This comes as no surprise, as the HD 5870 has been confirmed as the most powerful single GPU in the world, and the HD5970 is two of them.
HD 5970 performance specifications
| HD 5850 | HD 5870 | HD 5970 | |
| Process | 40nm | 40nm | 40nm |
| Transistors | 2.15B | 2.15B | 4.3B |
| Engine Clock | 725MHz | 850MHz | 725MHz |
| Stream Processors | 1440 | 1600 | 3200 |
| Cumpute Performance | 2.09 TFLOPS | 2.72TFLOPS | 4.64 TFLOPS |
| Texture Units | 72 | 80 | 160 |
| Texture Fillrate | 52.2 GTexels/s | 68.0GTexel/s | 116.0 GTexel/s |
| ROPS | 32 | 32 | 64 |
| Pixel Fillrate | 23.2Gpixel/s | 27.2GPixel/s | 46.4GPixel/s |
| Z/Stencil | 92.8Gsamples/s | 108.8GSamples/s | 185.6GSamples |
| Memory Type | GDDR5 | GDDR5 | GDDR5 |
| Memory Clock | 1000MHz | 1200MHz | 1000MHz |
| Memory Data Rate | 4.0Gbps | 4.8Gbps | 4.0Gbps |
| Memory Bandwith | 128.0 GB/s | 153.6 GB/s | 256 GB/s |
| Maximum Board Power | 170W | 188W | 294W |
| Idle Board Power | 27W | 27W | 42W |
The HD 5970 is clearly intended to play games at ultra high resolutions such as 2560×1600. The card can support three screens running at 2560×1600 in an Eyefinity setup.
AMD has provided their own benchmark scores for a single HD 5970 running various games on a three monitor Eyefinity setup at 1920×1200.
HD 5970 benchmarks (3x1920x1200)
| Frames per second | |
| BattleForge 4xAA 8xAF | 32 |
| CoD – WaW 8xAA 16xAF | 61 |
| Crysis Warhead | 29 |
| FarCry 2 4xAA | 50 |
| Left 4 Dead 8xAA 16xAF | 84 |
| HAWX 4xAA 8xAF | 44 |
| NFS Shift 4xAA 8xAF | 62 |
| Fallout 3 | 56 |
Independently published benchmarks are expected to begin appearing online over the next few days.
AMD SA could not provide final confirmation for local pricing or availability on the HD 5970, but it is selling for around £500 (R6200) in the UK, so we could see it retailing locally for around R9000. A mere handful of the cards are expected to land in SA next week.
AMD SA is focusing on improving availability of their more entry level HD 5770s over the next few weeks, with a view to securing more HD 5850s, HD 5870s and HD 5970s in the coming months.
Discuss HD5970 in the forums
Loading ...
