Now, more people than ever can experience real innovation in DirectX 11 gaming with the Club 3D HD5700 graphics card series. Loaded with advanced technology, this graphics card has the power and premium features you need for fully immersive gameplay. Expand your visual real estate across up to three displays and get lost in the action with revolutionary ATI Eyefinity technology. Using ATI Stream technology, accelerate even the most demanding applications and do more then ever with our PC. Enable realistic visual effects and an explosive HD gaming performance to dominate the competition.

Enjoy an incredibly immersive HD gaming/computing experience with ATI Eyefinity Technology. This revolutionary multi-display technology allows you to expand your visual real estate across up to three displays with innovative "wrap around" capabilities to maximize your field of view with incredible sharpness and clarity. Perform tasks on a PC faster with ATI Stream technology, speed up demanding everyday applications and get more done in less time. The first fully Microsoft DirectX 11-compatible GPUs, Club 3D HD5800 Series is designed to deliver ultimate HD gaming performance for the latest games and DirectX 11 applications so you can dominate the competition.

TUL Corporation, a leading manufacturer of AMD graphics cards, today releases the latest gaming video cards: the HD5700 series. Designed for demanding DirectX 11 games at HD resolutions and high settings, PowerColor HD5700 series offers the intense gaming performance and unrivaled image quality.

PowerColor HD5700 series supports ATI's exclusive Eyefinity Technology, with dual DL-DVI / HDMI / Display Port onboard design, it can run up to three displays from a single card and let all gamers enjoy the "wrap-around" gaming experience like never before. Also, the latest HD5700 series is compatible with ATI Stream technology, enables demanding data parallel compute tasks from the CPU to GPU, accelerate the daily application and do more with your PC.

For NVIDIA's PhysX technology, it has been a roller-coaster ride since NVIDIA's acquisition of the technology, and its makers. As much as PhysX quickly became one of the important selling-points of NVIDIA's consumer graphics line GeForce, it also had its small share of controversy, linked to market dynamics more than anything. With the technology's port to the GeForce GPU, enthusiasts fancied having the freedom of choice with a primary GPU that is dedicated to rendering 3D graphics, and a second GPU that is just about powerful to assign as a dedicated PhysX GPU.

Although having a powerful ATI Radeon GPU aided by a less-powerful NVIDIA GeForce GPU for PhysX was possible on Windows XP, the succeeding Windows Vista restricted this, by making sure two active display drivers couldn't coexist. Windows 7 removed this restriction, but before you could rejoice, NVIDIA quickly released a driver-level code with its 186 series drivers, that disables NVIDIA PhysX altogether when a GPU from another vendor is coexisting and enabled, even an IGP for that matter. If that wasn't bizarre enough, with the latest drivers, you can't even pair an Ageia PhysX PPU card with an ATI Radeon GPU going about its business. To the rescue comes a soft-modder's nifty bit of software that overrides this restriction from NVIDIA's drivers, so you can use dedicated GeForce PhysX cards on machines with ATI Radeon primary GPUs again. The corrective driver patch comes from tech portal NGOHQ.com community member GenL.

AMD and Pixelux Entertainment announced a joint development agreement that is part of the AMD effort to greatly expand the use of real-time physics with graphics through the open source Bullet Physics engine. By encouraging development of physics middleware built around OpenCL and Bullet Physics, AMD and Pixelux offer a route toward physics simulation that spans game consoles, PCs and other hardware platforms. The latest graphics technologies, like the ATI Radeon HD 5800 series of GPUs, offer incredible visual fidelity and high performance physics simulation by taking the next step in realistically animating how rendered game objects move, deform and break.

"Proprietary physics solutions divide consumers and ISVs, while stifling true innovation; our competitors even develop code that they themselves admit will not work on hardware other than theirs," said Eric Demers, chief technology officer for graphics at AMD. "By working with Pixelux and others to enable open support of physics on OpenCL and DirectX 11 capable devices we are taking the exact opposite approach."

Club 3D, european graphics cards specialist is proud to announce the new HD 5800 Series lineup. Prepare to experience a riveting high-definition gaming experience with Club 3D HD 5800 series. Expand your visual real estate across up to three displays and get lost in the action with revolutionary ATI Eyefinity Technology. Using ATI Stream technology, accelerate even the most demanding applications and do more than ever with your PC. The first to deliver full support for Microsoft DirectX 11, The Club 3D HD 5800 series enables realistic and explosive HD gaming.

Enjoy an incredibly immersive HD gaming/computing experience with ATI Eyefinity Technology. This revolutionary multi-display technology allows you to expand your visual real estate across up to three displays with innovative "wrap around" capabilities to maximize your field of view with incredible sharpness and clarity.

AMD today launched the most powerful processor ever created, found in its next-generation graphics cards, the ATI Radeon HD 5800 series graphics cards, and the world's first and only to fully support Microsoft DirectX 11, the new gaming and compute standard shipping shortly with Microsoft Windows 7 operating system. Boasting up to 2.72 TeraFLOPS of compute power, the ATI Radeon HD 5800 series effectively doubles the value consumers can expect of their graphics purchases, delivering twice the performance-per-dollar of previous generations of graphics products. AMD will initially release two cards: the ATI Radeon HD 5870 and the ATI Radeon HD 5850, each with 1GB GDDR5 memory. With the ATI Radeon HD 5800 series of graphics cards, PC users can expand their computing experience with ATI Eyefinity multi-display technology, accelerate their computing experience with ATI Stream technology, and dominate the competition with superior gaming performance and full support of Microsoft DirectX 11, making it a "must-have" consumer purchase just in time for Microsoft Windows 7 operating system.

"With the ATI Radeon HD 5800 series of graphics cars driven by the most powerful processor on the planet, AMD is changing the game, both in terms of performance and the experience," said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Products Group, AMD. "As the first to market with full DirectX 11 support, an unmatched experience made possible with ATI Eyefinity technology, and ATI Stream technology harnessing open standards designed to help make Windows 7 that much better, I can say with confidence that AMD is the undisputed leader in graphics once more."

Nearly a week ahead of its launch, Dutch retailer Salland Automatisering briefly listed a Radeon HD 5870 1 GB accelerator from a now-masked manufacturer (we are fairly sure it's Sapphire, looking at its part number "21161-00-50R" that resembles the part number scheme of other products from this manufacturer). Since Salland's pricing is usually consistent with those of other major European retailers, it gives a coarse indication of what you would have to pay for a Radeon HD 5870 1 GB: 268.90 EUR (excluding taxes), 319.99 EUR including taxes applicable in The Netherlands. AMD's Radeon HD 5870 1 GB accelerator is slated for September 23. It also comes in a 2 GB variant priced slightly higher, and an Eyefinity Edition planned. Salland was quick to withdraw the listing.

AMD today announced that according to the latest industry data, notebook manufacturers have chosen ATI Mobility Radeon Premium graphics processors to drive more than half of today's discrete graphics notebooks. The data for mobile discrete graphics reveals a 36.5% market share gain, and 87.27% more units sold quarter-over-quarter through the first six months of 2009. AMD now holds the "Number 1" position with an overall 53% mobile discrete market share. The incredible momentum behind ATI Mobility Radeon Premium graphics processors is a result of:

• Advanced performance, leading features, and innovative technology delivered by the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4000 series of graphics processors, such as ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4530 and ATI Mobility Radeon 4670, including support for the latest Microsoft DirectX 10.1 enabling a home theater-quality HD multimedia experience, and an energy-efficient design for long battery life at work, at home or at play
• With well over 200 design wins of current and future commitments from leading manufacturers worldwide, customer adoption of the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4000 series of graphics processors has increased across a wide range of mobile discrete notebook segments, including the HP Pavilion dv6T, Alienware M17, Acer Aspire 5739G, Toshiba Satellite M500, Sony VAIO FW Series, Samsung R522, Asus W90Vp-X1, MSI GX623 and Dell Studio 15 -- a balanced portfolio of AMD- and competitor-based notebook platforms
• An augmented presence in retail, including Best Buy Canada and Future Shop with a focus on the HP Pavilion dv6 Artist Edition Entertainment Notebook PC featuring AMD Turion Ultra X2 Dual-Core Mobile Processor and ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4650 graphics

All bets are off, AMD's DirectX 11 compliant GPUs are on course to compliment the commercial launch of Microsoft Windows 7, with enough of a head-start to allow buyers to have DirectX 11 hardware by the time they have the new OS. Codenamed "Evergreen", AMD's new family of graphics processors are slated for September 10, that's 25 days from now.

The company further carried out demos of its upcoming hardware to sections of the media in private, at their suite in the same hotel in which Quakecon 2009 is being hosted at. Behind the covered side-panel of the Lian-Li is a working sample, which AMD refused to let being pictured. Legit Reviews sneaked around the case to take a shot of its panel nevertheless.

AMD further demonstrated over six new technology demonstrations including Parallax Occlusion Mapping, Detailed Tessellation, and High-Definition Ambient Occlusion, all of which will be some of the key ingredients of DirectX 11, and in all of which, AMD's hardware is churning out high frame-rates at 2560x1600 pixel resolution.

Shuttle Inc., the market leader in the area of mini-PCs and the manufacturer of multi-form-factor solutions, is now offering another barebone for modern AMD processors. The SA76G2 hits the market with a style not unlike its predecessor, the SN68SG2: classic black G2 design in polished aluminium.

Even at only 30 x 20 x 18.5 cm (DxWxH), the compact device is the first mini-PC barebone from Shuttle to support AMD processors for socket AM3. Processors with AM2 and AM2+ sockets can also be used, ensuring maximum compatibility and long-term upgrade options. This versatility comes thanks to the AMD RS760/SB710 chipset inside.

PowerColor will launch the world's first water cooled Radeon HD 4890 next week, less than one week after the RV790 card was officially launched.

Part of PowerColor's LCS series, the upcoming Radeon card comes with a single-slot EK-made waterblock that has a copper base and high-flow 3/8" or 1/2" fittings. The waterblock should lower the GPU temperature by up to 20°C compared to the reference air heatsink. PowerColor will ship the Radeon HD 4890 LCS with GPU and memory clocks of 900 and 4000 MHz respectively.

The MSRP of the card will be $339.

TechPowerUp and Hightech Information Systems (HIS) present you a great opportunity to bag a Radeon HD 4890 1 GB graphics accelerator with body-graphics designed by you! The contest is pretty simple if you have the creativity and competitive spirit. We will provide you with a template and some image resources (company logos). You put your skills to work, and come up with a body-graphics design in one month's time. You get to submit as many as three candidates of your own. At the end of the contest, a panel of judges from AMD, HIS and TechPowerUp will select three of the best entries.

The winner gets his/her design printed on a special Radeon HD 4890 graphics accelerator made by HIS, and of course, the accelerator itself! The first and second runners up receive HIS Radeon HD 4850 IceQ4 512 MB, and HIS Radeon HD 4650 iSilence 512 MB respectively. For more information, contest rules, and to participate, visit this page. Good Luck!

AMD today released the latest version of their ATI video driver, Catalyst 9.3. The key addition with this release is official support for Windows 7, in the form of a unified graphics driver for Windows 7 and Windows Vista. As part of supporting Windows 7, Catalyst 9.3 supports WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) 1.1 for all ATI Radeon HD 4000, HD 3000 and HD 2000 series of graphics cards. According to AMD, "this new WDDM 1.1 support utilizes DirectX 10 rather than DirectX 9 and can cut down your GPU memory usage by half when opening up multiple windows thereby enabling increased performance."

AMD have said the driver brings performance benefits in several cases where framerates are CPU limited and using ATI Stream technology, owners of the ATI Radeon HD 4000 Series, ATI Radeon HD 3000 Series, and ATI Radeon HD 2000 Series of graphics accelerators will see a performance boost in their Folding@Home scores when running the latest Folding@Home client. AMD only documented one performance improvement in the release notes:

• Lost Planet: Colonies gains up to 20% on 4800 series products, and up to 50% on 4600, 4500 and 4300 series products

DOWNLOAD: ATI Catalyst version 9.3 for Windows XP/Vista/7 (32/64-bit versions)

TechPowerUp today released Radeon BIOS Editor version 1.20, our popular ATI Radeon graphics card BIOS manipulation utility. The newest version of the software brings about some important feature-additions, along with improved stability and minor bug fixes. Changes in this version, as listed in the software's changelog is as follows:

• Added hex editor
• Added alternative BIOS extraction method
• (Hopefully) fixed the 3650 Device-ID-bug for good
• Fixed a bug concerning weird 4670 fan settings

For a complete version history, and to download the software, please visit this page.

ATI wants to diminish the list of supported graphics cards in the next release of Catalyst. With the release of ATI Catalyst 9.4, the plan is to exclude support for Radeon 9500, 9600, 9800, X800, X1800, X1900 and other desktop video cards. Catalyst 9.4 will also lack support for the FireGL X1/X2/X3, V3000, V5000, V7000 and FireMV 2200, 2250 professional cards. Of course owners of these models will still be permitted to download older drivers and use them happily. The ATI Catalyst 9.4 is set to be released next month.

ATI's CrossFire multi-GPU technology started off on the Intel platform with ATI's own brand of chipset before AMD acquired the company. AMD/ATI then allowed CrossFire and the succeeding CrossFireX standards to be supported by Intel chipsets. The only current chipset platform that doesn't support CrossFire is the NVIDIA nForce series, which as ASRock demonstrated during the ongoing CeBIT event, breaks the dogma.

ASRock devised a BIOS for its nForce 740i based N7AD-SLI motherboard that enables support for CrossFire. AMD's Catalyst drivers were able to detect the motherboard as a qualified platform and enable CrossFire between two installed ATI Radeon accelerators. The setup was able to show performance increments during a 3DMark06 session. ASRock is reportedly working out similar BIOS firmware for several other motherboards made by it, and wants to enable CrossFire, CrossFireX for all its nForce motherboards.

Following reports of AMD's next flagship GPU, the RV790 being pushed to April, a fresh report from Hardware-Infos suggests that its sibling, the RV740 will join the league of the company's product launches slated for April. Company sources tell Hardware-Infos that the company has no product-launches scheduled for the upcoming CeBIT event held in Germany. The report suggests constraints of TSMC, a major foundry partner for AMD's graphics product group (GPG), with regards to its 40 nm bulk manufacturing process, as a likely cause although this bit wasn't endorsed by the source.

Another source shed some light on the specifications of the two graphics processors. It is suggested that the RV790 has expanded machinery at its disposal, with 960 stream processors and 48 texture memory units. Engineering samples based on the said GPU are known to carry faster memory chips. The specifications coupled with the suggested higher clock speeds of 850/975 MHz (core/memory) help explain how the RV790 could manage to pose competition to the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 accelerator. The RV740 on the other hand, is said to carry 640 stream processors, 32 texture memory units, and a 128-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface.

AMD today announced ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4000 series graphics, its next generation series of notebook graphics processors, bringing leading gaming and multimedia technology from the desktop to notebooks. These feature-rich graphics processors redefine mobile gaming with advanced capabilities including support for the latest Microsoft DirectX 10.1 games, a home theatre-quality HD multimedia experience, and energy-efficient features for long battery life to help users get the most out of their notebook at work, at home or at play.
The ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4800 series redefines HD gaming performance with support for ATI CrossFireX technology to deliver up to one teraFLOP of performance power. ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4600 series offers a superb balance of performance and energy efficiency. Optimal for thin and light notebooks, the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4300 and ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4500 series provide exceptional battery life for anyone on the go.

Today at CES, AMD President and Chief Executive Officer Dirk Meyer and OTOY Chief Executive Officer Jules Urbach unveiled a plan to revolutionize the deployment, development and delivery of HD content through the "AMD Fusion Render Cloud", a massively-parallel supercomputer. The announcement took place during AMD's Industry Insider Series keynote at the Las Vegas Hilton Theater, where AMD was joined on stage by industry luminaries such as Lucasfilm, Dell, HP and Electronic Arts.

"AMD has a long track record in the supercomputing world. Seven out of 10 of the world's fastest machines, including the fastest two computers on the planet, are powered by AMD hardware," said Meyer. "Today, AMD is pleased to announce a new kind of supercomputer unlike any other ever built. It is being designed to break the one petaFLOPS barrier, and to process a million compute threads across more than 1,000 graphics processors. We anticipate it to be the fastest graphics supercomputer ever. And it will be powered by OTOY's software for a singular purpose: to make HD cloud computing a reality. We plan to have this system ready by the second half of 2009."

XFX, following its recently announced collaboration with AMD, today introduced its first Radeon HD-powered 4000 series cards, the XFX Radeon HD 4870, 4850, 4830, 4650 and 4350.

All five models feature exceptional memory bandwidth, board power and compute power as well as a number of industry-firsts. For example, the XFX Radeon HD 4870 is the first graphics card with GDDR5 memory.

Thermaltake today announced an initiative with AMD to redesign the revolutionary Xpressar micro refrigeration cooling system for use with ATI Radeon HD 4000 series graphics cards. First introduced in a specialized case designed to achieve CPU temperatures much lower than standard liquid cooling systems, the Xpressar technology will be modified for use as a graphics cooling solution. When commercially available, the Xpressar graphics solution could reduce graphics processor temperatures by as much as 20°C when compared to common liquid cooling products.

The Thermaltake Xpressar micro refrigeration cooling system utilizes a miniature version of the compressor cooling module commonly used in refrigerators and air conditioners. To streamline installation, the graphics cooling module will utilize a compact design, occupying only the drive bay area in the computer.

PINE today announced that its graphics division, XFX, is partnering with AMD. The collaboration will incorporate the award-winning ATI Radeon HD 4000 series GPUs into XFX's already impressive line of extreme performance graphics cards.

"We are delighted as this partnership allows us to incorporate the current and future AMD graphics technology into our future graphics card designs, and enables our R&D teams to develop an even wider range of graphics products for our worldwide customers," said Michael Chiu, Chairman and CEO of Pine Technology Holdings.

A longstanding partner of NVIDIA, XFX would soon embrace AMD to release graphics cards based on the ATI Radeon series. Its plans however are somewhat similar to what Gainward seems to be executing: to maintain strong ties with NVIDIA, while dedicating a smaller portion of its product lineup to those incorporating ATI Radeon GPUs.

Expreview spoke with an XFX official, who confirmed that the company would be taking up projects based around ATI Radeon products, while continuing to maintain its partnership with NVIDIA by continuing to have flagship products using the NVIDIA GeForce. XFX would be going as far as making sure that its products based on ATI Radeon GPUs wouldn't release in the Chinese market (a key market for NVIDIA products). The decision by XFX to work on ATI Radeon products came as a surprise to many, since XFX has been a staunch NVIDIA tier-1 partner.

ATI has just released this year's final version of its Catalyst driver package. As you might already know from our previous BETA release post, with the release of ATI Catalyst 8.12 users can now unlock the potential of accelerated applications enabling ATI Stream technology for various ATI Radeon graphics processors. This release also adds Stream technology to ATI's AVIVO Video Converter and many performance improvements.

DOWNLOAD: ATI Catalyst 8.12

Earlier today, AMD announced the release of its much anticipated enterprise quad-core processor, the new Quad-Core AMD Opteron, codenamed "Shanghai". A regular feature with AMD press releases, is that the PR team details about the products' availability. In this particular release, AMD went a step further and revealed the brand name the company's desktop 45nm processors would carry: Phenom II, when getting into details about the AMD Dragon enthusiast platform. Dragon succeeds Spider, and consists of a Phenom II processor, running on AMD 7-series core logic, along with ATI Radeon HD 4000 series graphics accelerators.

The Phenom II processors will consist of a whole range of quad-core, triple-core and dual-core processors, with the products segregated on the basis of their core count, clock-speed and cache arrangement. Several models are lined-up for launch. The platform itself, as AMD asserts, would release in Q1, 2009. There are signs of the company launching some models of the Phenom II X4 sooner, for which motherboard vendors have already started releasing lists of their existing motherboards that are ready for the processors.