If there’s one thing you can count on when a new graphics chip is launched is that there will be a reference design which means, more or less, every single board at launch will sport the same speeds and designs so choosing one depends on what sort of image you like on the card’s cooler.

XFX carries on that fine tradition with their Radeon HD 5770 graphics card. You’ll get all of the great mid-range performance you want without the tough decisions. Hardware Secrets has the review:

This model, also known as HD-577A-ZNFC, comes with 1 GB, two DVI outputs, one HDMI output and one DisplayPort output, following the reference model from AMD. This video card allows you to use up to three video monitors at the same time as a single desktop, feature known as “Eyefinity”. But there is a catch: the third monitor must use the DisplayPort connector, which is still not popular.

I lacks the Eyefinity prowess that its big brothers sport but three monitors is nothing to sneeze at either.

The mid-range isn’t the mid-range you remember, it’s now what used to be last generation’s high-end, performance-wise at least. It’s all a little confusing but given the price/performance ratios offered by these new products it’s not hard to figure out why an upgrade is so tempting.

Rage3D has a look at the Sapphire Radeon HD 5770 graphics card and its DirectX 11 supporting ways. It’s no 5870 but it’s sure to handle most of your budget gaming needs:

In some circumstances the HD5770 outperforms the HD4870, thanks to a high engine clock and plenty of GDDR5, and in others the reduced memory bandwidth shows itself; but really this card is the average gamers hero, offering HD gaming performance, Eyefinity, Dx11 and more as well as great HTPC features.

Intriguing to say the least. Budget based CrossFire anyone?

Gaming has come a long way graphics-wise but there’s still quite a ways to go when it comes to the details that would make them truly immersive. One of those somewhat under-represented features is physics modeling which would improve realism but has so far been splintered into camps.

AMD has joined up with Pixelux Entertainment in order to develop an open source alternative physics engine that should be able to run on any OpenCL or DirectX 11 DirectCompute capable graphics card or hardware.

Interesting approach but, then again, there are only so many graphics chip makers and Intel, with Havok, and Nvidia, with PhysX, have already staked their claim.

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Multi-monitor solutions over the years have ranged from astounding driver nightmares to expensive third party solutions and, in the end, never really came into form when supporting gaming across multiple displays.

AMD seeks to change all of that with their upcoming ATI Radeon Eyefinity technology which should be showing up on their next generation DirectX 11 supporting cards. HardOCP has seen the 7680×3200 promised land:

What you are seeing below is a single air cooled AMD next-gen video card in a consumer ATX case powering six LCD displays. No tricks, no switches. Six 30" LCD panels with DisplayPort, and one "Evergreen" video card. This card is a future product that will likely be for sale around the holidays, but on launch day every card will support no less than 3 displays.

It is an exciting product, hopefully we’ll see a return to super sampling anti-aliasing in older titles with all of that extra horsepower under the hood.

Microsoft’s upcoming WIndows 7 launch will bring with it another important piece of software for gamers, DirectX 11 (which will also support Vista). Ok DX11 is targeted at much more than just the gaming segment (GPGPU usage for one) but it’s set to do some might impressive stuff on the graphics front.

AMD showed off their latest DirectX 11 graphics card hardware at QuakeCon and a few lucky gamers got a chance to scope it out. Legit Reviews has a writeup on what went down:

AMD had five or six SDK demonstrations that showed off the power and features of this new DirectX 11 graphics card. One of the demonstrations that best shows the differences would be their main tessellation demo. This SDK has three different rendering mode and the most basic of these modes is bump mapping. Bump mapping is a computer graphics technique to make a rendered surface look more realistic by modeling the interaction of a bumpy surface texture with lights in the environment. Bump mapping does this by changing the brightness of the pixels on the surface in response to a heightmap that is specified for each surface. On the DirectX 11 graphics card running D3D11 at 2560×1600 the framerate was observed at 494 frames per second (FPS).

More graphical eye-candy coming your way with improved performance and snazzy features for developers to exploit.

You can’t fault AMD’s Richard Huddy for being a little enthusiastic about Microsoft’s upcoming DirectX 11 and the features it brings along for graphics cards. The graphics API’s "Local Data Share" capability is, in his words, the killer feature which should allow for some impressive performance improvement.

Different program threads running on the card will be able to access information from each other quickly compared to past implementations leading to "up to three times the performance possible with DirectX 10.1"

Speedy! Although it’d be nice to know what performance implications this means for GPGPU performance.

Source: PC Games Hardware

AMD has been firing on all cylinders lately, well at least their ATI graphics division has. The company showed off the world’s first Microsoft DirectX 11 capable graphics chip at Computex and it’s quite impressive.

Trusted Reviews has a look at their presentation and what it means for our enthusiast gaming future:

The former is something we’ve talked about at length before and indeed
is something that AMD has supported on its graphics cards since the HD
3000 series (also on the Xbox 360). However, it’s only with DX11 that
there will be a universal platform that takes advantage of these card’s
capabilities. Tesselation, then, is the ability to smooth out the
polygonal surfaces that make up 3D scenes by interpolating extra
polygons between those of the base model. With hardware acceleration
this can essentially be done for free where normally such high polygon
counts would massively impact on performance. The long and short of it
is 3D models will look considerably smoother and more realistic without
performance dropping significantly.

Tessellation and the compute functions found in DirectX 11 will make our games look more realistic and harness the power of the GPU for things other than gaming.

Microsoft’s DirectX 10 graphics API promised us all a much richer visual experience when titles and graphics cards made full use of the technology, given how long new features take to work into game development things didn’t turn out so well. Oh the graphics did improve but DX10 titles regularly lagged in performance compared to DX9 games.

DirectX 11 is Microsoft’s response promising much better efficiency and better support for multiple cores, which should improve on performance, all the while adding new visual tricks for developers to take advantage of. Betanews has a look at what it’s all about:

The biggest evidence that Microsoft has learned its lesson comes from the fact that DirectX 11 will work on graphics cards rated for DX9 and DX10.
During the Vista era, to run DX10 you needed a DX10 card. This doesn’t
mean that all of DX11’s features run on a DX11 card, but what it does
mean is that it doesn’t exclude older hardware and, in so doing, rate
it a second-class citizen.

Support for older cards, graphical and performance improvements, GPGPU support? It all sounds very impressive!