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We are going to talk about three unique ATI Radeon HD 4890 modifications that could be a good choice for those who are not yet ready to spend a fortune on the new Radeon HD 5870. Products from Gigabyte, MSI and Sapphire – all in one roundup.
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<p><font size="2">NVIDIA astonished us with GT200 tipping the scales at 1.4 billion transistors. Fermi is more than twice that at 3 billion. And literally, that's what Fermi is - more than twice a GT200.</font></p>
<p><font size="2">At the high level the specs are simple. Fermi has a 384-bit GDDR5 memory interface and 512 cores. That's more than twice the processing power of GT200 but, just like RV870 (Cypress), it's not twice the memory bandwidth.<br />
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</font><font size="2">The architecture goes much further than that, but NVIDIA believes that AMD has shown its cards (literally) and is very confident that Fermi will be faster. The questions are at what price and when.</font></p>
<p><font size="2">The price is a valid concern. Fermi is a 40nm GPU just like RV870 but it has a 40% higher transistor count. Both are built at TSMC, so you can expect that Fermi will cost NVIDIA more to make than ATI's Radeon HD 5870.</font></p>
<p><font size="2">Then timing is just as valid, because while Fermi currently exists on paper, it's not a product yet. Fermi is late. Clock speeds, configurations and price points have yet to be finalized. NVIDIA just recently got working chips back and it's going to be at least two months before I see the first samples. Widespread availability won't be until at least Q1 2010.</font></p>
<p><font size="2">I asked two people at NVIDIA why Fermi is late; NVIDIA's VP of Product Marketing, Ujesh Desai and NVIDIA's VP of GPU Engineering, Jonah Alben. Ujesh responded: <strong>because designing GPUs this big is "fucking hard".</strong></font></p>
<p><font size="2">Jonah elaborated, as I will attempt to do here today.</font></p>
<p><font size="2"><a href="http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3651">Read more...</a></font></p>
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<p><strong><font size="2">AMD’s Radeon HD 5850: The Other Shoe Drops</font></strong></p>
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<blockquote><font size="2">“<span>For those of you looking for the above and a repeat of the RV770/GT200 launch where prices will go into a free fall, you’re going to come away disappointed. That task will fall upon the 5850, and we’re looking forward to reviewing it as soon as we can.”</span></font></blockquote>
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<p><font size="2">-From our Radeon HD 5870 Review</font></p>
<p><font size="2"><span>Today the other shoe drops, with AMD launching the 5870’s companion card: the slightly pared down 5850. It’s the same Cypress core that we saw on the 5870 with the same features: DX11, Eyefinity, angle-independent anisotropic filtering, HDMI bitstreaming, and supersample anti-aliasing. The only difference between the two is performance and power – the 5850 is a bit slower, and a bit less power hungry. If by any chance you’ve missed our </span>Radeon HD 5870 review</font><span><font size="2">, please check it out; it goes in to full detail on what AMD is bringing to the table with Cypress and the HD 5800 series.<br />
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<a href="http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3650">Read more...</a></font></span></p>
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<p><font size="2">We will start off our P55 coverage this week by answering a question that has been raised numerous times as of late, “Exactly how will the new DX11 cards perform on the Lynnfield/P55 platform compared to the Bloomfield/X58?”. The answer to that question depends on the game engine, settings, and processor choice for the most part. There has been much speculation that the Lynnfield/P55 platform would fail miserably with the next generation cards. That said, the difference in platform performance between the first DX11 capable cards available (ATI HD 5870/5850) is about the same as previous generation cards we tested in the Lynnfield launch article. </font></p>
<p><font size="2">This means for single card performance both platforms trade blows for supremacy. However, for those running CF/SLI setups, the X58 continues to be the platform of choice for users wanting the best possible benchmark results. Does that mean the integrated dual x8 PCIe 2.0 logic on Lynnfield is a poor choice compared to the dual x16 PCIe 2.0 sporting X58? Absolutely not based on our initial tests. In fact, it should satisfy most users. </font></p>
<p><font size="2">Now for those making an investment into an ultra high-end HD 5870 CrossFireX setup, the Core i7/X58 configuration will simply offer the best possible performance. Of course that performance comes at a cost, particularly power consumption. However, we have a feeling most owners sporting two HD 5870s are not that concerned about Al Gore knocking on their door in the middle of the night. </font></p>
<p><font size="2">In the meantime, we have our first performance results comparing the Core i7/860 and P55 against the like priced Core i7/920 and X58 in a variety of games. We are going to state this upfront, this is not a GPU review of the HD 5870. Instead, we decided to pull this information out of the upcoming high-end P55 roundup so it did not get lost in the mix. Our resolution is limited to 1920x1080 that we use in the motherboard test suite.<br />
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<a href="http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3649">Read more...</a></font></p>
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The long-awaited launch of the new ATI Radeon HD generation has finally happened. WE are going to find out how successful the Radeon HD 4800 successor turned out to be and what it is capable of in real conditions.
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Sometimes a surprise is nice. Other times it’s nice for things to go as planned for once.
Compared to the HD 4800 series launch, AMD’s launch of the HD 5800 series today is going to fall in to the latter category. There are no last-minute announcements or pricing games, or NDAs that get rolled back unexpectedly. Today’s launch is about as normal as a new GPU launch can get.
However with the lack of last-minute surprises, it becomes harder to keep things under wraps. When details of a product launch are announced well ahead of time, inevitably someone on the inside can’t help but leak the details of what’s going on. The result is that what we have to discuss today isn’t going to come as a great surprise for some of you.
As early as a week ago the top thread on our video forums had the complete and correct specifications for the HD 5800 series. So if you’ve been peaking at what’s coming down the pipe (naughty naughty) then much of this is going to be a confirmation of what you already know.
Today’s Launch
3 months ago AMD announced the Evergreen family of GPUs, AMD’s new line of DirectX11 based GPUs. 2 weeks ago we got our first briefing on the members of the Evergreen family, and AMD publically announced their Eyefinity technology running on the then-unnamed Radeon HD 5870. Today finally marks the start of the Evergreen launch, with cards based on the first chip, codename Cypress, being released. Out of Cypress comes two cards: The Radeon HD 5870, and the Radeon HD 5850.
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A year ago Lucid announced the Hydra 100: a physical chip that could enable hardware multi-GPU without any pesky SLI/Crossfire software, game profiles or anything like that.
At a high level what Lucid's technology does is intercept OpenGL/DirectX commands from the CPU to the GPU and load balance them across any number of GPUs. The final buffers are read back by the Lucid chip and sent to primary GPU for display.
The technology sounds flawless. You don't need to worry about game profiles or driver support, you just add more GPUs and they should be perfectly load balanced. Even more impressive is Lucid's claim that you can mix and match GPUs of different performance levels. For example you could put a GeForce GTX 285 and a GeForce 9800 GTX in parallel and the two would be perfectly load balanced by Lucid's hardware; you'd get a real speedup. Eventually, Lucid will also enable multi-GPU configurations from different vendors (e.g. one NVIDIA GPU + one AMD GPU).
At least on paper, Lucid's technology has the potential to completely eliminate all of the multi-GPU silliness we've been dealing with for the past several years. Today, Lucid is announcing the final set of hardware that will be shipping within the next ~30 days.
It's called the Hydra 200 and it will first be featured on MSI's Big Bang P55 motherboard. Unlike the Hydra 100 we talked about last year, 200 is built on a 65nm process node instead of 130nm. The architecture is widely improved thanks to much more experience with the chip on Lucid's part.
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Our today’s article will be a brief retrospective of almost entire ATI Radeon HD 4xxx lineup while only a few days are left before the new graphics flagship solution – ATI Radeon HD 5870 – comes out.
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Our today’s review will be the last one in a series of articles devoted to performance of super-powerful multi-GPU graphics configurations. This time we are going to witness the performance by GeForce GTX 295 SLI tandem also know as Quad SLI.
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<font size="2">The first GeForce GTX 295 revision couldn’t become very popular because it was too complex and expensive. Today we are going to find out how successful Nvidia’s second attempt to create the most powerful single-processor graphics adapter turned out to be.<br />
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<a href="http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/inno3d-geforce-gtx295-platinum.html">Read more...</a></font>