Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

AMD Radeon HD 5970 Dual-GPU Card Sweeps Benchmarks

Posted by kdawson on from the when-only-the-honkingest-will-do dept.

MojoKid writes "AMD launched yet another high-end graphics card based on their Radeon HD 5800 series technology, and this time it's a dual-GPU variant. Considering the fact that AMD's Radeon HD 5870 is currently the fastest single-GPU powered graphics card currently on the market, the new dual-GPU powered Radeon HD 5970 should offer performance that completely outclasses any other single graphics card on the market right now. The card has 3200 stream processors under the hood, though its graphics engines are built on 40nm manufacturing technology, so power consumption isn't actually too insane. The card does exceptionally well in the usual benchmarks, as expected." HotHardware has begun providing single-page views — a user-friendly decision. PCPer.com also has coverage. And pcpro.co.uk wonders whether, at 13" (33 cm) in length, the new card will even fit in most PC cases.

5 of 201 comments (clear)

  1. Don't forget Anandtech by distantbody · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3679

  2. Re:games? by AvitarX · · Score: 3, Informative

    better, like good hardware accelerated video decoding?

    Or are you comparing open source drivers?

    I know Nvidia has some suck in its drivers too, but the ATI ones are terrible.

    --
    Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
  3. Re:AMD's Idea of "Launch" by Astatine · · Score: 4, Informative

    Anecdotally, the situation is not as bad as "4-6 weeks". I have a 5850. I pre-ordered it a couple of days before launch. I got it the following week.

    According to the web forum of the retailer I shopped with (overclockers.co.uk) the stock has been trickling in in small shipments. If the shipments are never quite large enough to finish off the retailer's pre-order book, the item may never appear as "in stock" on the website (giving the impression there aren't any around at all), even though people who order are actually getting them reasonably promptly.

  4. Re:The problem is.... by bcmm · · Score: 3, Informative

    I will agree that open-source drivers for ATI cards are fantastic (and binary drivers are truly terrible). I'm using the new (using release candidates of kernel 2.6.32) r600 hardware acceleration support, and it's already working very well for me (mostly for Google Earth and Kwin desktop effects, both of which work flawlessly and very smoothly).

    However, I would caution that support for the chip mentioned in this article (Radeon Evergreen) is marked as "TODO". Presumably, it should progress relatively fast, because AMD is basically being helpful.

    Nvidia deserves some credit for updating their binary driver regularly, and making helpful changes very fast when alphas of KDE 4 started showing up performance issues in some previously rarely-used features, but AMD has done rather better by actually providing documentation to freedesktop people (even if ATI never maintained their own binary driver very well at all).

    --
    # cat /dev/mem | strings | grep -i llama
    Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
  5. Re:games? by Cornelius+the+Great · · Score: 3, Informative

    ATI drivers used to be BAD. My old Radeon 7500 couldn't even handle glxgears without crashing. ATI drivers have gotten remarkably better since the AMD merger, and my radeon HD4850 handles compiz just as well as my Geforce 8800GTX.

    In windows, I'm seeing more stability in games with the ATI card. Anecdotal, yes, but I believe that ATI's drivers have certainly improved on both Windows and Linux and no longer deserve their former reputation.

    --
    Sigs are for losers