The majority of graphics chips tend to go from cradle to grave housed in the same PCB design the chip manufacturer created for it. There’s very little incentive to create something new unless there are obvious cost or performance benefits.

The Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 Toxic Edition fancies itself a performance option with its new fangled cooling and new PCB design. AnandTech has the review:

With that in mind, we were able to use the AMD GPU Clock Tool to push our card by a further 130MHz on the core to 895MHz, and an additional 50MHz on the memory to 1175MHz. This is 17% core overclock and 4% memory overclock respectively. Thus unlike the already overclocked Toxic card, the games that will respond the best here are those that are GPU limited instead of memory bandwidth limited.

A good nudge on the overclocking front and it helps you get away from the pervasive red and black coolers the Radeon HD 5000 lineup is known for.

Putting together a gaming rig used to mean laying down a rather large chunk of cash for the best components that would give you an advantage over the competition…or in some cases just to run that new game that requires insane system resources. Thankfully the mid-range isn’t too far off from the high-end nowadays.

The Sapphire Radeon HD 5770 and 5850 graphics cards are a step below the current high end but the low performance means quite a bit of cash saved. Hardware Canucks has the review:

When push comes to shove, the two cards featured here may seem to be nothing more than distant relatives when it comes to benchmarks. However, it is quite evident they are both perfectly positioned to take full advantage of the market segments they are competing in. ATI really did make a series of rational, well thought-out decisions when releasing the HD 5770 and HD 5850 since while there is enough of a buffer zone between them in terms of price and performance that they will never end up competing with one another. They also both outclass anything from the competition…so much so that it seems NVIDIA has stopped producing their competing GT 200 series and is instead patiently waiting for GF100 to arrive.

Either card is certain to give your gaming performance a boost.

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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