AMD launches Radeon HD 5850 and 5870

Deals double dose of DirectX 11, and awesomeness.

Much to the chagrin of Nvidia, AMD/ATI today launched its RV870 architecture with the highly anticipated Radeon HD 5850 and HD 5870 graphics cards.

We could spend a whole day writing about it, but we'll leave that up to our reviews. In the meantime we'll give you the skinny on what they are and what you can expect.

As you've figured out by now there are two SKUs, the HD 5850 and 5870, both built on the RV870. The RV870 architecture itself isn't an entirely new approach to the GPU design - it's both a die shrink and a doubling-up of raw processing power on a single die, with some extra silicon thrown in to accommodate advanced features like the new display controllers and Tesselation unit.

Here are the official specs from AMD's presentation.

AMD has essentially twice all of the good stuff it had on the RV770 architecture and it has produced a 1440-1600 stream processor monster with 2.15 billion transistors on a single die. The clock rates are 725MHz and 850MHz for the junior and senior cards. Both cards have 1GB of GDDR5 memory running on a 256-bit interface at 1GHz and 1.2GHz, respectively. This means they'll deliver 128Gbps and 153.6Gbps of memory throughput. Otherwise the chips have identical feature sets.

GDDR5 is now supplied by Hynix and Samsung, as opposed to the now-defunct Qimonda kit. You'll notice the differences between the 5850 and 5870 are really down to binning and marketing, as the dies are one and the same.

Performance-wise, the numbers presented by AMD show across-the-board improvements over the previous generation, and bad news for Nvidia. Against the GTX 285, AMD is showing anything from 18 per cent to a rather extreme 155 per cent gain in Lost Planet: Colonies under Windows 7 at 2560x1600 resolution.

That's not your typical gaming situation, but it's definitely the target for the HD 5870.

One of the biggest changes over the RV770 is the RV870's power management. While 170W and 188W at load might sound high, AMD did double the SIMD units on these chips while moving to a new node. However, according to AMD, the new boards can keep an idle power rating of 27W, compared to 90W in the HD 4870. That should save a bit on the power bill, and your ears. You really wouldn't want to browse the web with a hoover in the background.