AMD ATI Radeon HD 5870: Unquestionably Number One

Name: AMD ATI Radeon HD 5870: Unquestionably Number One
Brand: AMD

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, September 23, 2009, 12:00 AM EDT

Intro, Specifications and Related Info

Over the past couple of weeks, we've been completely preoccupied trying to come up with a catchy and informative introduction for this article. We thought maybe it would be fun to play off of AMD's tree-laden GPU codenames to come up with an interesting segue into the Radeon HD 5800 series' power efficiency. But we came up short. Then we thought we could use an image of the Radeon HD 5870's cooler and draw a parallel to the awesomeness that was the original Bat Mobile, but a couple of folks from AMD snagged that idea. Even being briefed on the technology we're about to show you on the very same aircraft carrier that scooped up the Apollo 11 astronauts didn't cure the writer's block.

Then it hit us. Why bother? PC Enthusiasts are always chomping at the bit trying to glean even the slightest bit of information about cutting edge GPU technology. And that's exactly what we've got in store for you right here.

We've got a sneaking suspicion that telling you all about the first DirectX 11 compatible GPU, that's crammed with over 2 billion transistors, produced using an advanced 40nm process, would get you all worked up into the kind of frenzy that a no pithy intro could. So, feast your eyes on the Radeon HD 5870, check out the specs and features below, and read on for full scoop on AMD's latest flagship GPU. Just don't get too worked up, too quickly. We want you to make it all the way to the end without passing out...

AMD Radeon HD 5870 DirectX 11 Graphics Card

AMD ATI Radeon HD 5870

Specifications and Features

2.15 billion 40nm transistors

TeraScale 2 Unified Processing Architecture

1600 Stream Processing Units
80 Texture Units
128 Z/Stencil ROP Units
32 Color ROP Units

GDDR5 Memory Interface

Up To 153.6GB/sec of memory bandwidth

PCI Express 2.1 x16 bus interface

DirectX 11 support

Shader Model 5.0
DirectCompute 11
Programmable hardware tessellation unit
Accelerated multi-threading
HDR texture compression
Order-independent transparency

OpenGL 3.2 support

Image quality enhancement technology

Up to 24x multi-sample anti-aliasing
Super-sample anti-aliasing modes
Adaptive anti-aliasing
16x angle independent anisotropic texture filtering
128-bit floating point HDR rendering

ATI Eyefinity

Advanced multi-display technology
Three independent display controllers
- Drive three displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls, and video overlays
Display grouping
- Combine multiple displays to behave like a single large display

ATI Stream acceleration technology

OpenCL 1.0 compliant
DirectCompute 11
Double precision floating point processing support
Accelerated video encoding, transcoding, and upscaling
- Native support for common video encoding instructions

ATI CrossFireX multi-GPU technology

Dual, triple, and quad GPU scaling
Dual-channel bridge interconnect

ATI Avivo HD Video & Display technology

UVD 2 dedicated video playback accelerator
Advanced post-processing and scaling
Dynamic contrast enhancement and color correction
Brighter whites processing (blue stretch)
Independent video gamma control
Dynamic video range control
Support for H.264, VC-1, and MPEG-2
Dual-stream 1080p playback support
DXVA 1.0 & 2.0 support
Integrated dual-link DVI output with HDCP
- Max resolution: 2560x1600
Integrated DisplayPort output
- Max resolution: 2560x1600
Integrated HDMI 1.3 output with Deep Color, xvYCC wide gamut support, and high bit-rate audio
Max resolution: 1920x1200
Integrated VGA output
Max resolution: 2048x1536
3D stereoscopic display/glasses support
Integrated HD audio controller
Output protected high bit rate 7.1 channel surround sound over HDMI with no additional cables required
Supports AC-3, AAC, Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio formats

ATI PowerPlay power management technology

Dynamic power management with low power idle state
Ultra-low power state support for multi-GPU configurations

Certified drivers for Windows 7, Vista, and XP

Speeds & Feeds

Engine clock speed: 850 MHz
Processing power (single precision): 2.72 TeraFLOPS
Processing power (double precision): 544 GigaFLOPS
Polygon throughput: 850M polygons/sec
Data fetch rate (32-bit): 272 billion fetches/sec
Texel fill rate (bilinear filtered): 68 Gigatexels/sec
Pixel fill rate: 27.2 Gigapixels/sec
Anti-aliased pixel fill rate: 108.8 Gigasamples/sec
Memory clock speed: 1.2 GHz
Memory data rate: 4.8 Gbps
Memory bandwidth: 153.6 GB/sec
Maximum board power: 188 Watts
Idle board power: 27 Watts

Radeon HD 5800 Series Design Goals...

A few of the design goals AMD / ATI set when the Radeon HD 5870 was still in the design phase are outlined on the slides above. Of course, a lot of groundwork had to be laid over the years before the company could produce such a product. As the above list of specifications and features show, the new Radeon HD 5870 is quite advanced in comparison to other current GPU products. But the chip does leverage technologies already implemented in previously released GPUs--it's not all new. As such, we'd recommend perusing some recent HotHardware articles to brush up on a few of the technologies and features employed by the new Radeon HD 5870...

The articles listed above cover many of the features available with the Radeon HD 5870, like CrossFire, the UVD 2 video engine, Catalyst Control Center, PowerPlay, GDDR5 memory, and more. There are, however, a lot of brand new things being introduced with the Radeon 5800 series that we plan to cover on the pages ahead. So strap in as we take the most advanced GPU released to date for a spin through the the labs--we promise you won't be disappointed.