AMD ATI Radeon HD 5850 Performance Review
Introduction and Specifications
Exactly one week ago today, AMD unleashed the ultra powerful, DirectX 11-ready ATI Radeon HD 5870 upon the PC gaming world and staked a claim as the undisputed 3D performance leader. Having evaluated the features, performance, and image quality of AMD's latest and greatest flagship we were left thoroughly impressed, not only with the new Radeon's killer performance, but its extensive feature set, excellent image quality, power consumption, and competitive price.
In our coverage of the official launch of the Radeon HD 5870, we also revealed AMD's plan to release a more affordable, pared-down version of the card, with a shorter PCB, lower core and memory frequencies, also sans a few stream processors and texture units, dubbed the Radeon HD 5850. Unfortunately, cards did not arrive in time to be tested alongside the 5870. The Radeon HD 5850 did arrive in the lab a few days later, however, and we jumped right on testing it.
We've got our evaluation of the $259 Radeon HD 5850 available on the proceeding pages. First up some specs and a quick refresher, then its onto the close ups, performance, and a little overclocking...
AMD Radeon HD 5850 DirectX 11 Graphics Card
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| 2.15 billion 40nm transistors TeraScale 2 Unified Processing Architecture
Up To 128GB/sec of memory bandwidth PCI Express 2.1 x16 bus interface DirectX 11 support
Image quality enhancement technology
ATI Stream acceleration technology
ATI CrossFireX multi-GPU technology
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ATI Avivo HD Video & Display technology
ATI PowerPlay power management technology
Certified drivers for Windows 7, Vista, and XP
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Radeon HD 5850 Feature Summary
The Radeon HD 5850 shares the exact same features as the more powerful Radeon HD 5870. In fact, the GPU powering the card is essentially the same chip with a few functional blocks disabled. Radeon HD 5850 cards are still DirectX 11-ready, support ATI Eyefinity multi-display technology, offer the same UVD updates, and new anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering modes.
Where the two cards differ are in their allotment of stream processors--the Radeon HD 5850 has 1440 versus 1600 on the 5870. The Radeon HD 5850 also has fewer texture units, a shorter PCB, and a lower clocked GPU and memory. The changes made to the 5850 result in a much lower-power, more affordable product. How much performance has changed remains to be seen, so let's get a move on, shall we?
