ATI Launches Radeon HD 5800 Series, First DirectX 11 GPUs

From DailyTech: When ATI first launched the Radeon HD 4870 last year, it delivered a new level of performance at a great price point. NVIDIA struggled to compete, but still managed to hold onto a lot of its marketshare.

With the launch of Windows 7 and DirectX 11 on October 22, many video card buyers are already looking for DX11 cards in order be ready for the latest games and to future-proof their systems. ATI is giving the public that option by launching the Radeon 5800 series today.

The Radeon HD 5870 and the Radeon HD 5850 both use the same GPU core, previously codenamed Cypress. Comprised of 2.15 billion transistors, it has almost three times as many transistors as Intel's Core i7 CPU. The Radeon 5870 runs at a core clock of 850MHz, while the Radeon 5850 runs at 725MHz.

The Radeon 5870 has an impressive 1600 Stream processors and is capable of delivering up to 2.72 teraFLOPS. It is the most powerful single GPU video card currently available and will sell for around $379 at e-tailers. Meanwhile, the Radeon 5850 has 1440 Stream processors and will be priced around $259. Both cards are paired with 1GB of GDDR5 memory, and will use a dual slot design.

One of the more interesting things that ATI is doing is called Eyefinity. It allows the use of up to three monitors together through a single video card. All cards in the 5800 series will have two dual-link DVI ports, a HDMI port, and a DisplayPort. Since a TMDS transmitter is needed for each DVI or HDMI port, the use of a DisplayPort monitor or adapter is needed to use the third monitor. Eyefinity is capable of support three displays at a resolution of up to 2560x1600, but future models will support up to six monitors.

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