Updated November 17th:The Radeon HD 5970 specification has now been finalised by ATI.
This dual-GPU will be one of - if not the - fastest graphics cards available by this Christmas time. The card features 2x RV870-based GPUs running at 725MHz clock speed, and packing 1600 shaders, as well as 2GBs of GDDR5 memory. The dual nature of the graphics processors brings the shader count up to 3200.
The card's maximum power intake is rated at 294W (42W at idle), and its performance is 4.64 Teraflops, and 64 ROPs. It includes 160 texture units; 116 Gtexel/s fill rate; 56.4Gpixel/s; 185.6Gsample/s Z/stencil, and a 4.0Gbps memory data rate. Two DVI and DisplayPort peripheral interfaces are also available.
All in all, if you are a GPU client folder, this isn't a bad choice of card, however the somewhat lacking nature of the ATI drivers does as ever pose a problem, insomuch as causing performance hits over nVidia's equivalent cards. However, in terms of general usage, it will easily overtake nVidia's GTX 295 in terms of raw power.
Contributed by: Oksana Niko
Source: Fudzilla
KaySL
On: 11/17/09
