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Today AMD is officially unveiling their new Radeon HD 5870 and 5850 GPUs, designed to deliver significantly more performance than previous generation products. The Radeon HD 5870 is taking a run at the performance crown and is the first high-end GPU to use the 40nm design process. So get ready for a round of benchmarks, as we put these new GPUs to the test… This is the moment all you gamers have been waiting for, the release of the new Radeon series. Today AMD is unleashing the Radeon HD 5870 and 5850 graphics cards, and while we do not have the latter, we do have the flagship part and we plan to test the hell out of it. Before we begin I would just like to make it clear that the Radeon HD 5870 is nothing like the current generation 4870.  By this I mean it is not a budget performance part and it will not be slower than other single GPU products already out there, in any game. The Radeon HD 5870 GPU, which goes by the codename “Cypress XT”, is based on a 40nm design and features, get this, 2150 million transistors! This is an incredible transistor count, as last year AMD released the Radeon HD 4870 with 956 million transistors. This means in just over a year AMD has more than doubled the transistor count of their most complex GPU. That said, the GeForce GTX 285 GPU codenamed “G200b” contains roughly 1400 million transistors, while the upcoming GT300 GPU is expected to exceed 2000 million transistors as well. So while the complexity of the new Radeon HD 5870 graphics card is impressive, it puts them back on track with Nvidia. AMD has already planned quite a few models for the Radeon HD 5000 series and while they are releasing just two of them today, expect the Radeon HD 5870 X2, 5770, 5750, 5670, 5650 and 5550 to follow. The Radeon HD 5870 X2 (Hemlock XT) is a dual-GPU version of the Radeon HD 5870 that we will be looking at today, and is expected to be released late next month along with the 40nm Radeon HD 5770 (Juniper XE) and Radeon HD 5750 (Juniper LE). Also planned are some 32nm graphics cards for the first quarter of 2010, as AMD start using this new manufacturing process with their low-end products, as they often do. The Radeon HD 5670 (Redwood XT), Radeon HD 5650 (Redwood PRO) and Radeon HD 5550 (Cedar XT) are all 32nm budget parts that should run extremely cool and consume very little power. Getting back on track, the Radeon HD 5870 is set to cost roughly $400, while the 5850 is said to come in at around $300. The Radeon HD 4870 launched with a price tag of $300, which was continuously slashed over the following months after its release. The Radeon HD 5870 will likely not suffer the same fate, at least not until Nvidia come up with their next generation products. While $400 might sound like a lot, it's just $50 more than Nvidia is currently asking for their GeForce GTX 285, and considerably less than the GTX 295. However the Radeon HD 5870 is also roughly twice the price of a Radeon HD 4890 Crossfire setup at $400, so it will be interesting to see how it performs when compared to the Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics card for example. |
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