AMD announced its newest high-end graphics card this morning, the dual-chip ATI Radeon HD 5970. Available today for $599, the new high-end card features two clock speed-reduced Radeon HD 5870 GPUs on a single graphics card.
Based on the Radeon HD 5000-series chip design, the new Radeon HD 5970 card has the same features common to AMD's other new 3D cards, including DirectX 11 support, GPU computing via ATI's Stream technology, as well as support for up to three monitors via a technology AMD calls Eyefinity (the six-monitor card is due out "soon," according to AMD).
AMD's new ATI Radeon HD 5970 dual-chip graphics card.
(Credit: AMD)Unique to the Radeon HD 5970, AMD has budgeted overclocking headroom into the cooling hardware and unlocked the clock speed multipliers for both the GPU and the graphics memory. Included software will let you overclock the card, and AMD has also included multiple fail-safes to prevent overheating or damage to the card or your system.
Overclocked or otherwise, the Radeon HD 5970 performed well in various review from around the Web, taking over as the fastest graphics card currently available. It trumps Nvidia's GeForce GTX 295 on almost every test we found. This isn't a surprise given that Nvidia's top single-chip card fell to the AMD's single-chip Radeon HD 5870 when it debuted last month, but it's particularly interesting because Nvidia's answer, the DirectX 11-based Fermi, isn't due until at least the first quarter of next year (Nvidia teased a preview of Fermi hardware on its Facebook page today).
You can find reviews of the new Radeon HD 5970 from Anandtech, Hexus, HotHardware, MaximumPC, and PC Perspective , among others.
Update: AMD sent along a clarification of the various issues Nvidia raised regarding AMD's drivers:
"We actually moved our DirectX 9 hardware to a "legacy driver" status back in March 2009, and we were quite open about this move" [[ed: News to us]]. We've been providing updates to this driver on a quarterly basis - ironic considering the fact that we are offering more frequent updates of our "legacy" driver than some companies do of their "current" drivers. In fact we will be posting a new legacy driver in the next few days.
Also, as you probably well know, WDDM1.1 (Windows Display Driver Model) is the driver architecture required to run Windows 7. To meet Microsoft requirements, GPU's must be DirectX10 and later level hardware. As stated on our website, Windows 7 users with DirectX 9 AMD graphics hardware can use the legacy Windows Vista WDDM 1.0 drivers (as it is not possible for DirectX 9 hardware to support the WDDM 1.1 driver requirements)."
Ever-helpful Nvidia sent us an e-mail this morning with a few updates regarding Windows 7 and AMD's older 3D cards. Some of AMD's old cards are cut-off from official Windows 7 support altogether, and others are missing out on a few of Windows 7's more-advanced features. Before we accuse AMD of abandoning its customer base, we thought we'd try to track down just how many customers will be affected by this news.
The numbers for the Windows 7 cut-off issue are difficult to track down due to the age of the cards involved. As announced in a support update on its Web site, AMD plans to move its pre-DirectX 10 graphics cards to legacy status. That means AMD will no longer update the software drivers for 3D cards from its Radeon HD 1000 series or older. You can try using the most current Vista-compatible driver for those cards in Windows 7, or try to find a user-made driver, but AMD won't be able to provide you with support.
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Update: Reviews from Anandtech, HardOCP, HotHardware, MaximumPC, and PC Perspective are all live. Nvidia's dual-chip GeForce GTX 295 card outperforms the Radeon HD 5870 on most tests by a noticeable margin, so AMD can't claim that the Radeon HD 5870 is the fastest single-card solution. The good news is that new Radeon does outperform Nvidia's best single-chip card, the GeForce GTX 285. The dual-chip GTX 295 is also a $499 card with no DirectX 11 support. The Radeon HD 5870 goes for a more reasonable $379.
AMD introduced its ATI Radeon HD 5870 and Radeon HD 5850 desktop graphics cards Tuesday evening, beating rival Nvidia to the marketplace with the first DirectX 11-capable products. As DirectX 11 is the Windows 7 version of Microsoft's code for linking up hardware with, among other things, 3D game software, winning the race to launch is a significant boon to AMD's efforts to market its new cards. It also ensures that even if few games will actually use DirectX 11 at launch, Microsoft can claim that the graphics hardware is ready to support one of the major new features of its new OS.
Expect a whole family of Radeon HD 5000 series cards to come to market over the next few months, but for now we get two cards, the $399 Radeon HD 5870 and the $250 Radeon HD 5850. AMD says it plans to ship 500,000 chips in the fourth quarter, but it also anticipates high demand will strain retail supplies during the first few weeks after launch. On the system builder side, AMD said that one large OEM has claimed the majority of the first round of Radeon 5800s, so the cards will also be scarce from other system builders, at least early on.
AMD's new ATI Radeon HD 5800 series graphics card.
(Credit: AMD)Dropping its chip manufacturing process from 55 nanometers to 40 nanometers in the Radeon HD 5800 series has let AMD ramp up the speeds and feeds of its new chips impressively over those of the Radeon HD 4800 series. The transistor count in particular has jumped from 956 million on the old design to 2.15 billion in the new model. AMD also claims an uptick from 1.2 teraflops of processing power to between 2.09 and 2.72 in the each of the new cards.
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Where Blu-ray meets wood grain: the Vaio NW160J
(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET)Is Blu-ray the future of laptops? If Sony had its way, that would certainly be the case. And if all Blu-ray-playing laptops were as well-executed as Sony's Vaio NW160J, that wouldn't be the most daunting consideration. Sony has been packaging its Vaio laptops as design-centric, relatively expensive multimedia machines with a Blu-ray-playing focus for a while now, so it shouldn't be a surprise that the company's new line of slightly higher than midrange laptops, the NW series, culminates with a 15.4-inch Blu-ray version.
This model, the NW160J, comes in at $929. There are even more affordable NW Vaios with Blu-ray drives inside, but the NW160J also comes with above-average, gaming-capable ATI graphics along with its midrange Core 2 Duo processor, making it more expensive than slightly less graphically robust competitors. However, if you're looking for a well-designed Vaio with Blu-ray, a very good screen, and an excellent-feeling keyboard and touch pad--without moving up to a massive 17-inch desktop replacement--you've come to the right place.
Does Blu-ray matter to you, or is it superfluous to your laptop-purchasing considerations? Let us know below.
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AMD)
We've tried not to get too hung up on the posturing by both AMD and Nvidia over whose graphics card driver software is most prepared for Windows 7. With no major upheaval to the Windows core driver design, as with the transition from XP to Vista, we expect both vendors will have little trouble making the switch on October 22nd. We're a bit more interested in a press release from AMD today, heralding a demo of its forthcoming DirectX 11 graphics hardware at the Computex trade show in Taiwan. That makes AMD the first vendor to show the next generation of 3D chips to the public.
Other than the fact that it says AMD has demonstrated graphics hardware performing a few DirectX 11-based operations, the press release provides very little concrete information about the next generation chip. It mentions an end of 2009 release, which lines up with a story on the Inquirer last week. The Inquirer piece also suggests the chip will debut as the ATI Radeon HD 5870, which sounds plausible to us.
Even if the chip details are sparse, AMD says it demonstrated its new hardware speeding nongaming applications in Windows 7 by way of the DirectCompute component of DirectX 11. DirectCompute, if you're unfamiliar, is essentially the Windows-based alternative to Nvidia's CUDA effort to offload certain nongaming application tasks, most typically video transcoding, from the CPU to the GPU. Nvidia is sure to support DirectCompute as well with its own DirectX 11 hardware.
We have no information on when Nvidia might come to market with its own next-generation GPUs, but for all of the effort Nvidia has put into marketing CUDA and GPU computing in general, it will be ironic if AMD brings its DirectX 11-capable chip out first, especially once Windows 7 introduces graphics-based computing to a wide consumer audience.
An Eee PC Netbook based on a Qualcomm processor that runs Google's Android operating system looks promising as an alternative to the millions of Netbooks out there tethered to Intel Atom processors and Microsoft Windows.
An Asus Qualcomm-based smart-book is a promising alternative to Windows-Intel Netbooks
(Credit: Asus)Asus was showing a Netbook at the Computex conference in Taipei running the Android OS on top of Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor, according to this TweakTown video.
When Asus plans to ship a Netbook based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon processor isn't clear and Asus is not disclosing its plans (later this year?), but it becomes even less clear when you add Google's Android operating system to the mix. Michael Rayfield, an Nvidia executive, doesn't expect Android Netbooks to appear commercially until next year.
What is clear, however, is that these Netbooks are different from the Windows-Intel variety. Qualcomm is calling them "smartbooks" rather than Netbooks to draw attention to the fact that they will operate more like smartphones: standard 3G connectivity, always-on, and all-day battery life.
And what makes this Asus demonstration at Computex interesting is that all Asus Netbooks to date have run on Intel processors. Obviously, Asus thinks the Snapdragon technology is different enough to warrant a separate design.
Other specification for the Netbook include a 10-inch screen, a built-in Webcam, and a universal 3G radio that supports UMTS and CDMA networks on all frequencies used globally, according to an IDG News report.
With a new 40-nanometer manufacturing process behind it, AMD announced the ATI Radeon HD 4770 3D graphics chip this morning. Available now on 3D cards starting at $109 (before a $10 online rebate), the Radeon HD 4770 is the first 3D chip built on the 40-nanometer process, which allows for faster, more power-efficient hardware than AMD's previous 55nm chips.
AMD's new double-wide Radeon HD 4770 graphics card goes for only $109.
(Credit: AMD)The various enthusiast review sites found the 512MB Radeon HD 4770 fast enough to play most current games at lower resolutions and image quality settings. Think 1,680 x 1,050 or lower and with little-to-no anti-aliasing. The Radeon HD 4770 also outpaced Nvidia's $95 GeForce 9800 GT on almost every test, and competed well with the approximately $130 Geforce 250 GTS (aka the GeForce 9800 GTX+). Its power consumption seems to stand out mostly under load, but its idle results showed little benefit.
If this new card delivers on performance, we still find it interesting that the boxed versions of the card from Gigabyte, Sapphire, and Powercolor each have a bulky fan bolted onto the chip. Each card will thus require the space of two expansion card slots inside a desktop (affectionately referred to as "double-wides").Traditionally, $99 cards have been single-slot designs, making them perfect for adding to smaller desktops or PCs with several other expansion cards. It seems that with the decline of dedicated sound cards, the 3D graphics card is making a PC land grab.
We hope to be able to get to a review of the Radeon HD 4770 (along with the other new 3D cards and CPUs we've missed), but we have a lab full of desktops at the moment, and more on the way. Until we clear the decks (August?), we suggest you check out the following enthusiast sites for in-depth reviews of AMD's new card:
Just in case you missed our live Webcast yesterday, Editors' Office Hours talked to CNET's Rich Brown, taking questions from the audience about all things related to 3D graphics cards.
From the latest in multi-GPU setups to the cheapest video card for playing World of Warcraft, we got a lot of probing questions from the viewing audience, all answered in Rich's typically knowledgeable, in-depth style.
If you're thinking of upgrading your video card or building a new gaming rig from scratch, you should definitely check it out.
After much fretting over prices, we can now wrap up our 3D card coverage, at least for now, as we post reviews of the Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 and the EVGA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 Superclocked. We call this a three-way because we've also included updated scores for the GeForce GTX 280 from back in June 2008, which now competes in this price range.
Sapphire's Radeon HD 4850 X2
(Credit: CNET)Prices became a concern for us in this roundup, as our target was initially $300 and less. The GTX 260 fits the bill, but the 2GB Radeon HD 4850 X2 we received from AMD didn't at first, hovering around $340. We thought about aiming lower, but the distance between $250 and the $150ish cards we reviewed last week didn't feel wide enough.
We asked for the 1GB version of the 4850 X2, but by the time we received it it seemed to have disappeared from retail availability. Fortuitously, as the 1GB version disappeared, the price on the 2GB model also came down to $299 at Amazon, and for a day at NewEgg, where it's currently about $319.
EVGA's GeForce GTX 206 Core 216 Superclocked
(Credit: CNET)For Nvidia's part, the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 started at $299 when we first acquired the product, and then dropped to about $260 by the time we finished, about a month and a half later (holidays, CES, etc.). We also saw that the GeForce GTX 280 started to hover around $320 or so. Thus, our spread here of $260 to $320, between three different cards.
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Unlike our recent look into high-end 3D cards, we know exactly what we have on-hand in the way of budget cards (thank you, Techpowerup's GPU-Z). For AMD's part, we have the Diamond Radeon HD 4850, with updated benchmarks from the numbers we ran in our July review. In Nvidia's camp, we get the EVGA GeForce GTX 9800+ Superclocked edition, an overclocked (for real this time), version of Nvidia's stock GeForce GTX 9800+ card.
The single-slot Diamond Viper Radeon HD 4850 is now available for $180.
(Credit: CNET)While both of these cards debuted this past summer, their prices have dropped slightly since then, creating an affordable little sweet spot for mainstream PC-gaming performance. If you shop at retailers like NewEgg.com and TheNerds.com that tend to have more aggressive pricing, the formerly $200 Radeon HD 4850 card is now available for about $180, and the GeForce GTX 9800+ is down from $225 to around $165. On the one hand, the $15 difference between them now may tip the scale towards the overclocked Nvidia card. On the other, the Diamond card only takes up a single card-expansion slot. The Nvidia card's double-wide design puts some limits on the kinds of systems that will accept it.
EVGA's double-wide GeForce GTX 9800+ Superclocked edition.
(Credit: CNET)Regardless of their physical attributes, the performance of these cards is almost identical. We even found that as long as you stick to a resolution of 1,680x1,050 you get the most headroom for higher image-quality settings, (except on original flavor Crysis, naturally). With very little performance differentiation, we're calling this round an effective draw, as the price and design differences create some situational advantages for each card.
The high-end and the budget-price ranges out of the way, that leaves us with only the midrange, $300 price point left to go. We still have to get our hands on one more card to complete that match-up. Once we do, we'll have those reviews posted as soon as we can.
