techETA » Radeon HD 5850

Radeon HD 5870 + 5850 CrossFireX pushes framerates quite nicely

Rafael Hernandez — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 07:00:20 +0000

Aside from the Hybrid CrossFire or Lucid Hydra multi-GPU coprocessor you don’t see many people delving into mis-matched graphics card pairs since they usually aren’t supported or they’re thought to be an inefficient usage of a high-end gamer’s time.

Interestingly the ATI Radeon HD 5870 and 5850 seem to pair up quite nicely, given their somewhat similar specifications, improving performance while saving you a bit of cash which is always a plus.

Asus 5870 + XFX 5850 CrossFireX Mismatch @ techREACTION

Sapphire Radeon 5850 Toxic 2GB Video Card loads up on the memory

Rafael Hernandez — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 02:12:50 +0000

The latest and greatest graphics chips are more than capable of pushing insane frame rates but are often stymied by less than adequate amount of memory available at higher resolutions.

Sapphire’s Radeon 5850 Toxic 2GB video card comes along with more graphics memory than the norm which should help out in those Eyefinity situations. PureOC has the review:

Out of the box, the most noticeable thing about the Radeon 5850 Toxic is its cooler; given the importance of the cooler to the entire purpose of the card this isn’t suprising. The look of the cooler is rather sleek and less industrial than its big brother, the 5870 Vapor-X. While aesthetics are entirely a personal matter of preference, we do think the 5850 Toxic looks rather stylish, and would fit handsomely in just about any case setup.

A nice mid-range choice for your next gaming rig.

AMD Catalyst 10.3a Prepped to boost framerates substantially

Rafael Hernandez — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 01:31:27 +0000

AMD has been on a bit of a roll with their Radeon HD 5000 series which offers impressive performance and image quality at rather low temperatures but the company always knew that their competition would come at them with something equally impressive.

Oddly enough the company’s response to the upcoming Nvidia “Fermi” launch mayjust be in the form of a driver update that has been showing some rather impressive frame rate boosts in the latest and greatest titles. The company has released their Catalyst 10.3 Preview Driver which not only improves performance but also includes Display Bezel Correction software which will help improve the visual experience even if you have some thick plastic border surrounding your Eyefinity displays.

They might just play spoilers for Nvidia’s launch in a few days, and likely brings up questions on whether or not they were holding back performance, but Radeon HD 5k owners are sure to be happy.

Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 Toxic Edition builds a custom home for its GPU

Rafael Hernandez — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 12:58:28 +0000

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.

http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3746

Sapphire HD 5770 and 5850 provide gaming thrills

Rafael Hernandez — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 04:12:03 +0000

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.

AMD Hopes to Push "Open Physics"

Rafael Hernandez — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:36:00 +0000

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.

AMD Announces Open Physics Initiative Designed to Bring New Levels of Realism to Gaming, Simulations, Popular Applications

Open and Industry Standards-based ATI Stream Technology Frees Industry from Proprietary Implementations

SUNNYVALE, Calif. –(Business Wire)– Sep 30, 2009 AMD (NYSE: 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.”

As the latest software developer to take advantage of ATI Stream technology to leverage multi-core CPUs and GPUs to accelerate execution of highly parallel functions, Pixelux will enable game developers to offer improved performance and interactivity across a broad range of OpenCL capable PCs. AMD is also actively pursuing support of Bullet Physics via the DirectCompute API in DirectX 11.

“Pixelux wants to ensure that our technology can take advantage of the computing resources that any particular hardware platform offers without locking in our users to any single platform,” said Mitchell Bunnell, CEO of Pixelux. “By working with AMD to run our software in OpenCL we stay true to that goal.”

Pixelux is an industry leader in material physics simulation based on the Finite Element Method. After many years of exclusivity, Pixelux has announced they will be providing a new version of its Digital Molecular Matter (DMM) System that can be licensed by anyone and that more easily integrates with other physics systems. This new version of DMM will feature integration with the free and open source Bullet Physics engine. DMM and Bullet are designed to operate together to enable players to experience visually and kinetically realistic worlds where objects react as they do in real-life. From crumbling stone walls, denting metal, splintering wooden beams and even swaying organic plant life, the combination of DMM and Bullet Physics, will be designed to enable users to experience the next generation of physics as never before and offer an amazing solution for game developers and incredible realism for players.

Additional detail on ATI Stream technology can be found at www.amd.com/stream.

About AMD

Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE: AMD) is an innovative technology company dedicated to collaborating with customers and technology partners to ignite the next generation of computing and graphics solutions at work, home and play. For more information, visit http://www.amd.com.

About Pixelux Entertainment

Pixelux was founded in October 2003 with the mission of automating art asset production through physical simulation. Pixelux’s Digital Molecular Matter (DMM) technology has been designed to take full advantage of GPUs and multiprocessor cores to achieve an unprecedented degree of simulation realism in the creation of real-time or cinematic simulations where objects can bend, crack and shatter all according to their physical properties. DMM Technology is available for PCs and Macs. Pixelux is a member of middleware programs for both the PlayStation®3 and Xbox 360™ and is available on a variety of popular game engines.