AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5870 Video Card Review
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One of AMD’s major design philosophies in creating the Radeon HD 5800 series was to borrow what worked for them with the Radeon HD 4800 series. Namely, this means building a GPU at an affordable closer-to-mainstream price, and designing it so that it scales upwards and downwards in performance and price. AMD have called this its "Sweet Spot" strategy.
The GPU being launched today is the ATI Radeon HD 5870, which is internally codenamed "Cypress." As you can see in the third screenshot the target selling price is just under $400. The same Cypress ASIC is also used to create the ATI Radeon HD 5850. According to AMD you should see about a 20% delta in performance between the 5870 and 5850 GPUs. You can think of the HD 5870 as the "Cypress XT" GPU and HD 5850 as the "Cypress Pro" GPU. "Hemlock" will be two of these HD 5870 GPUs in a single video card package, most likely to be branded the Radeon HD 5870 X2, and come at a much heftier price. "Juniper" is a more mainstream GPU that will culminate the HD 5700 series and is targeted around $200. AMD can scale down the GPU series even more to create a low cost "Redwood" and "Cedar" GPU similar to the Radeon HD 4770 and lower for mobile use. According to this chart, we will see Hemlock and Juniper in Q4 2009 and the ultra low-end parts Q1 2010. AMD's ATI definitely has set the goal internally to dominate the entire spectrum of the market with the 5800 Series, and it has certainly planned for parts from the ultra-low end up to the ultra-high end.
Looks like the 5870 is a winner. Excellent performance, even if not the best at all things, low pwoer, lower noise, excellent visual output, and at a GREAT price.
I remember reading the Read Me files of all different kinds of software over the years an i’d say the vast majority of issues these programs had had to do with either AMD Chips, ATI video cards or both at the same time.
This is why i ALWAYS stick with Intel and Nvidia.
Meh, just get a PS3. Nobody’s making PC games that will take advantage of these new cards because the market for PC games is almost dead. Besides, Uncharted 2 for the Playstation looks better than any PC game.
Dang, when did AMD buy ATI? I think I missed the boat on this.NVidia and ATI have always had some pretty nifty stuff. BTW, what is in the current Macs now? They used to use NVidia and ATI depending on pro/consumer line products, but I’m suspecting with Snow Leopard and their push into offloading CPU intensive GUI tasks to the GPU that they are more fans of ATI.
I remember the days when I used to follow the Mac rumor mill religiously, but now they we are Intel, it simply doesn’t matter - thank God. Let the best OS win - and it did. :)
AMD's Radeon HD 5870: Bringing About the Next Generation Of GPUs