Introduction

AMD's new Radeon HD 5800 Series has been surrounded by a lot of secrecy in the last months because AMD was very careful with providing information to anyone. Once the press had been briefed however this turned to the exact opposite. In the last few weeks not a single day has passed where no new leaked information turned up in some Internet forum. As you probably remember, we had an article collecting all the leaked images, which offered a huge amount of speculative information. But now the NDA is expired and we can provide you with our own pictures and performance data.

Today AMD introduces two new cards: the ATI Radeon HD 5850 and the ATI Radeon HD 5870. A third product, called "ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity6 Edition" has also been announced but it is simply a HD 5870 with six DisplayPort outputs. If you were drooling to see the HD 5870 X2 launched today, then you'll have to wait a few more months.
All the new cards are based on AMD's "Cypress" graphics processor, which could be described as RV870 equivalent. But (at least for now) AMD has done away with calling their GPUs by the Ryxxx codenames and uses the engineering codenames and the graphics card product names only.

Also check out our other HD 5800 related reviews: AMD Radeon HD 5870 PCI-Express Scaling and AMD Radeon HD 5870 CrossFire

Packaging & Contents

We received a card only, without retail packaging or other accessories.

Architecture

AMD has overhauled their architecture with what I would call evolutionary improvements, it is not a radical redesign. The most notably change is that the shaders are now grouped into two shader partitions of 800 shaders each. On the Radeon HD 5850
two SIMD engines are disabled, which also disables the attached Texture Units, think: "one whole row disabled per shader partition in the diagram".


As before, five Stream Cores per Thread Processor, of which one is a "fat one" and can handle complex shader instructions. They received updates that are required for DX11 and several new instructions that have been identified as "would be nice to have", "would give a nice performance boost". Game developers are usually not concerned with the actual instructions, the game developer writes HLSL shader code which is somewhat similar to C. Then the shader compiler (which is in the ATI driver) turns this high-level code into the instructions that GPU understands.


AMD introduced support for GDDR5 memory with their last generation of GPUs. For you the most important change is that memory clock changes can now happen very quickly, without any flickering. As a result the memory clock can be reduced in idle which shaves a huge wattage off the idle power consumption. Another change is error detection code inside the memory controller which detects errors in the data from memory and automagically corrects it - this will be important for overclocking, read more about it in the Overclocking section of our review.

The Card

AMD's latest ATI Radeon card looks mighty powerful. For me this is the best looking (and feeling) card that I ever had in my hands. The matte surface conveys a feeling of understatement and high quality. The subtle reds are a clear statement that this is an AMD/ATI card, yet it does not look overdone. Even though the black backplate serves no cooling purpose it does look great and adds a layer of protection to the card, so you can't break off small components.


From left to right: Radeon HD 4870, GeForce GTX 295 Single PCB, Radeon HD 4870 X2, Radeon HD 5870. As you can see this is a very long card, so make sure it will fit in your case. Also it is important to note that the red air vents near the back of the card do not serve any cooling function. They can be fully covered and the card will still pull in enough air via the fan hole.


Dual slot card, no surprises here. The red trim on the side, with the "ATI Radeon" text, is aligned so that it can be read when the card is installed in a normal case with window.


On the back plate you have a stamped ATI Radeon Premium Graphics logo which will also be visible if you have a case window.


The card has two DVI ports, one HDMI port and one DisplayPort. This is just one of many output configurations that are possible on the new cards, thanks to the overhauled display output logic. Basically the card can drive six TMDS signals that can be combined in any way (a dual-link DVI consumes two TMDS lines).
For HDMI Audio, NVIDIA requires you to feed an external audio source, for example from your motherboard's on-board audio, to the card via SPDIF cable. AMD on the other hand has integrated a sound device inside their GPUs which is the easier solution for most users. Also AMD's integrated sound device has been upgraded to support HDMI 1.3a which includes Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, AC-3, DTS and up to 8.1 channel audio with 192 kHz / 24-bit.


On the back of the card you see two nicely styled air vents that look great, yet have no cooling function. Most air is sucked in via the fan opening.


Crossfire dual, triple and quad configurations are supported to improve performance even further.


Here are the front and the back of the card, high-res versions are also available (front, back). If you choose to use these images for voltmods etc, please include a link back to this site or let us post your article.