AMD Phenom II Shatters 7GHz | Dragon Technology at Light Speed

 

Nvidia partners discontinued GTX285 and GTX275

Written by Fuad Abazovic

Monday, 12 October 2009 11:32

And GTX260 Several Nvidia partners have confirmed that they had to decide to cancel GTX 285 and GTX 275 based products, as availability was simply disastrous. We still don’t now if this is Nvidia’s strategy to keep the market hungry for Fermi or they simply didn’t order enough wafers, but availability of GTX260, GTX275 and GTX285 was so bad that many decided to drop these products and wait for Fermi. The lucky ones can sell Radeon HD 5870 and 5850, as they are selling good, but the 5870 is mainly on allocation and that doesn’t really help a lot. The GT200 generation is slowly but surely running towards its retirement and if you want one, simply grab it while you still can, or get RV870 or Fermi when it comes out. Source: http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15919/1/

Nvidia releases Geforce 191.07 WHQL driver

Written by Slobodan Simic

Tuesday, 06 October 2009 13:42

Performance boost for games and OpenGL Nvidia has released a new set of WHQL certified drivers with support for all Geforce GPUs ranging from Geforce 6 to Geforce 200 series, as well as the ION IGP. The new driver mainly brings performance boost in various games and the most important new feature is the support for OpenGL 3.2 on Geforce 8, 9, 100, 200 series and Nvidia’s ION GPUs. The performance boost includes ARMA 2, Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood with SLI, Fallout 3, Far Cry 2, Prototype, and of course, Batman: Arkham Asylum when GPU PhysX is enabled. The performance boost ranges from eight percent in Batman to up to 50 percent in Call of Juarez. The performance boost results are taken from the 191.07 vs. 190.62 comparison. The new driver also brings SLI support for Aion, Darkfall, Dawn of Magic 2, Dreamkiller, Fuel, Need for Speed: Shift and bunch of other titles. In addition to these performance boosts, the new driver also brings numerous bug fixes. The new driver can be downloaded at Nvidia’s website, here.

Nvida disables PhysX support

Written by Nick Farrell

Thursday, 01 October 2009 09:53

If you use ATI cards Nvidia, which once said it would enable processing of physics effects made using PhysX API on any GPU, is now doing the opposite. According to Xbit, the company recently started to disable PhysX support on systems that use ATI Radeon graphics cards for rendering and Ageia PhysX or Nvidia GeForce processors for physics effects computing. While it was not easy to make both ATI Catalyst or Nvidia ForceWare drivers or Nvidia PhysX system software work on the same system, apparently some people had managed it and this annoyed the Green Goblin. PhysX is an open software standard any company can freely develop hardware or software that supports it.  An Nvidia service person was quoted as saying that while for a variety of reasons,  some development expense, some quality assurance and some business reasons Nvidia will not support GPU accelerated PhysX with Nvidia GPUs while GPU rendering is happening on non-Nvidia GPUs. All this is strange as it has pushed PhysX as an open standard that can be used even by its arch-rival ATI. In fact there is an element of cutting its nose off to spite its face. PhysX support seems now to be limited to the installed base of the GeForce and does not allow to use it on machines featuring even other graphics accelerators. Those who need PhysX should only upgrade to Nvidia graphics boards if keeping the old card for PhysX we guess. source: http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15771/1/

XFX Radeon HD 5870 first glimpse

Written by Fuad Abazovic

Wednesday, 23 September 2009 16:34

Preview: Much faster than last gen We got a chance to do a quick preliminary round of tests on Radeon HD 5870 and since our samples only arrived today, we didn’t have the chance to test it out as meticulously as we would’ve liked. We will of course soon come out with a full-blown review but for now here is a glimpse of what the XFX HD 5870 1GB is capable of. Thanks to XFX we can show you at least a bit of what this card is all about. Since it has 2.15 billion transistors, the HD 5870’s ticker we like to call RV870 offers twice as much Shaders – 1600 in total. TMUs got a boost to 80 and the ROPs got up from 16 on the 48×0 generation to 32. In a way, the RV870 chip can be viewed as a single chip that has the power of two RV770 cores inside. This is not all though, as the chip is 40nm, the transistors are smaller, it supports up to three Eyefinity multi-displays with one regular card, and of course it comes with Shader model 5.0 and DirectX 11 support. This is a lot of innovation indeed but it still leaves a feeling that this chip is more evolution than revolution. Microsoft plans to launch Windows 7 in just about a month time and this will be the DirectX 11’s official birthday. The card supports the not-so-successful Stream parallel computing from AMD as well as OpenCL, open standard computing language. AMD is however still a lot more concentrated on gaming and will continue in that direction. XFX HD 5870 1GB card runs at default 850MHz core clock, 1200MHz GDDR5 256 bit memory and it packs one serious punch. XFX ships the card with Dirt 2 voucher, one Crossfire Interconnect Cable, DVI to VGA Adaptor and two 6 PIN to 4 PIN Power Cable. The suggested retail price in the US is $379 while in Europe it is €329 and UK around £300 if not more. We had just enough time to test FarCry 2 game and a couple of Futuremak tests. You can see the advantage of HD 5870 over HD 4870 X2 in the Vantage Extreme test, but note that the older dual GPU card is still better in most of games. At certain resolutions in Far Cry 2, the new fastest single GPU Radeon 5870 leaves the best single GPU Nvidia’s offering, the GTX 285 in the dust and wins with up to 21fps better results.

Source:

http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15652/1/

Asus has the first OCed HD 5800 cards

Written by Slobodan Simic

Wednesday, 23 September 2009 16:43

With Asus Voltage Tweak Technology Asus is the first AIB partner that will alter the reference frequencies on the HD 5800 series cards. Asus has decided to use its Voltage Tweak feature on these cards, which allow them to achieve higher clocks by raising the GPU voltage. It is a nice add-on and it looks like Asus found out that these cards overclock nicely with a bit of additional voltage to the GPU. Asus will launch a total of four cards, two HD 5870 and two HD 5850, where the only difference between the models is the bundle. One will come with the Dirt 2 game voucher while other one will be shipped without it, and will thus end up cheaper. With no voltage changes applied, Asus’ graphics cards are running at reference 850/725MHz for the core and 4800/4000MHz for the 1GB of GDDR5 memory. When Voltage Tweak comes into play, the HD 5870 can be overclocked to 1035MHz for the GPU and 5200MHz for memory by just raising the voltage from 1.15V to 1.35V. With the HD 5850 it gets even better as it can be overclocked via Voltage Tweak to 1050MHz for the GPU and 5200MHz for the memory by raising the voltage from 1.088V to 1.4V. By the looks of things and the figures, the HD 5850 is quite a jewel, and this might be a great card if you are into overclocking. According to Asus, this overclock raised the 3DMark Vantage Extreme Preset score from 8,087 to 9,252 for the HD 5870 and from 6501 to 8987 for the HD 5850. This also means that an overclocked HD 5850, which has less stream processors, might be capable of beating the higher priced HD 5870 at reference clocks, at least when talking about 3Dmark Vantage. Of course, we need not remind you about the price difference between these two cards. AMD might not be happy that Asus offers a voltage change option to its customers, but Asus will of course do anything to get an edge against the ever-tough competition on the market. Source: http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15653/1/

MSI shows its HD 5800 lineup

Written by Slobodan Simic

Wednesday, 23 September 2009 14:22

Two cards with a simple design MSI is yet another AIB partner that will, and has announced its HD 5800 series cards today. MSI has decided to go with the simplest design with big white letters on the card cooler, which is probably the best way, as those pictures are just meaningless unless you come up with an unique solution, at least until non-reference cards start to show up. The newly announced cards will have R5850-PM2D1G and R5870-PM2D1G model names will have 1600 and 1440 stream processors and will both be equipped with 1GB of GDDR5 memory paired up with a 256-bit memory interface. The HD 5870 works at 850 for the core and 4800MHz for the memory, while the HD 5850 is clocked at 725MHz for the core and 4000MHz for memory. The HD 5870 card should hopefully show up in retail sometime during this week, while the HD 5850 will have to wait for October. Source: http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15645/1/

Powercolor comes up with six HD 5800 cards

Written by Slobodan Simic

Wednesday, 23 September 2009 10:51

Different bundle, different price Powercolor has come up with no less than six different HD 5800 series cards, three bearing the HD 5850 brand and three in HD 5870 flavour. The only difference between these cards is the bundle as Powercolor decided to bundle one series with Dirt 2 game, another with a Konnet HDMI cable, while one is basically bundle-less. The HD 5850 series will work at 725MHz for the core and will be equipped with 1GB of GDDR5 1000MHz memory paired up with the 256-bit memory interface. The HD 5870 cards will have an 850MHz core clock, 1200MHz clocked 1GB of GDDR5 memory and the same 256-bit memory interface. As you probably already know, both cards have a similar cooler except for the fact that both the HD 5850 card and the cooler are a bit shorter than on the HD 5870. These cards are priced at US $259, US $269 and US $289 for the HD 5850 cards depending on the model, and US $379, US $389 and US $409 also depending on the model. You can check out full details here. Source: http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15638/1/

Today is HD 5800 day

Written by Slobodan Simic

Wednesday, 23 September 2009 10:20

Reviews coming up, stores still empty The AMD HD 5800 day has finally come, and as would expect, a bunch of HD 5870 reviews have already gone online. Unfortunately, the cards are still not available but listed at some shops so we guess that they should be available pretty soon. The bottom line is clear, ATI has a DirectX 11 card that is faster than its HD 4870 X2 card and any other single GPU card for that matter. You also shouldn’t forget Eyefinity, which gives this card a bonus feature if you ever happen to need it. Of course, the vast majority of gamers would rather stick to single or in best case scenario, a dual screen setup, but for those that need it, it will be a nice add-on as it makes the US $250 priced Matrox TripleHead2Go quite obsolete. The new HD 5870 is priced at US $379.99, something that came as a bitter surprise considering the HD 4870 US $299 price tag at launch, but most, if not all, reviews agree that its a decent price for such a product considering the performance boost, features and DirectX 11 support. Unfortunately, not a single review of the HD 5850 card hasn’t come online. This card should be priced at US $259 and should be capable of providing the performance which is close to the Nvidia GTX 285 card. In the previous generation, ATI stuck with DDR3 memory on the HD 4850, while it opted for GDDR5 on the HD 4870. This time around both cards feature GDDR5 and we’re expecting AIBs to come up with interesting non-reference version of the HD 5850 In any case, here is the full list of reviews that has gone online and we will add some more once they start to appear. - AnandTech - TechPowerUp - Guru3D - X-Bit Labs - Overclockers Club - HotHardware - Legit Reviews - Tweaktown - PCGamesHardware - PCEkspert.com source: http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15637/1/

Sapphire has two HD 5800 cards as well

Written by Slobodan Simic

Wednesday, 23 September 2009 15:20

Vapor-X getting ready The one AIB partner that wouldn’t miss the launch day is of course Sapphire, and as a bonus they decided to shed some light on the upcoming HD 5870 Vapor-X edition as well. As every other partner, Sapphire has come up with two, reference designed HD 4850 and HD 4870 cards. The HD 5870 works at 850 and 4800MHz for core and memory, while the HD 5850 is limited to 725 and 4000MHz. The more interesting fact is the Vapor-X HD 5870 model which Sapphire is working on. Sapphire has only issued a render of the card but in any case it is better than nothing. We are quite sure that this card will come with some mean overclock, at least once AMD gives a green light to AIB partners that they can launch their own. Bit-tech.net managed to score a picture and is also holding a competition so you could win one of these once they are available. Here are some pictures of the mentioned cards. Source: http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15648/1/

Radeon 5870 listed for $399

Written by Fuad Abazovic

Tuesday, 22 September 2009 09:58

Available tomorrow Radeon 5870 and 5850, both dual-slot cards, will become available within the next 24 hours and we expect that many users will jump and buy them without much thinking. Some shops didn’t want to wait and they’ve announced that H587F1GDG Radeon HD 5870 5800 Series 1GB GDDR5 PCI Express x16 (2.0v) Video Card Retail will sell for $399 + sales tax in case it applies. The box includes a HIS Graphics Card, 2x Power Cable 2x 4pin in, 6pin out, DVI – VGA Adapter, CrossFire Bridge, Install CD with Multilingual User Guide and BumpTop, Quick Installation Guide and HIS Power Up Label. You can pre-order one here and if AMD push them to remove it, don’t worry we have a screenshot. Let us serve you some AMD / ATI marketing why should you spend $399 for this card. The key features of ATI Radeon HD 5870 Series are: • 1GB GDDR5 memory • ATI Eyefinity technology with support for up to three displays* • ATI Stream technology* • Designed for DirectCompute 5.0 and OpenCL • Accelerated Video Transcoding (AVT)* • Compliant with DirectX® 11 and earlier revisions • Supports OpenGL 3.1 • ATI CrossFireX™ multi-GPU support for highly scalable performance* • ATI Avivo™ HD video and display technology* • Dynamic power management with ATI PowerPlay™ technology* • PCI Express® 2.0 support Key Advantage The World’s 1st DirectX® 11 Product - Full DirectX® 11 support enables intense gaming performance unrivalled image quality with stunning 3D visual effects, realistic lighting and lifelike imagery Free DiRT2 Game Coupon ATI Eyefinity – Run up to 3 displays from a single graphics board and expand your gaming field of view across all displays* ATI Stream – Tap into the massiveparallel processing power of • your GPU and tackle demanding tasks like video transcoding • with incredible speed • More than 2 teraFLOPS processing Power! • OpenGL3.1, DirectCompute 5.0 and OpenCL, ATI Avivo™ HD, CrossfireX, UVD2, 1080p, HDMI Support. Microsoft® Windows 7® • Enjoy all the benefits of Microsoft Windows 7® with ATI Radeon™ • HD 5800 Series GPUs which are designed to provide an exceptional experience for the upcoming operating system. • HIS Radeon graphics chips and Windows 7 graphics driver draws • Windows incredibly efficiently – helping to save system memory and enable a superior Windows experience. The Windows 7 Aero desktop was designed using the DirectX 11 API, for which ATI 5800 Series of products provide full support. Besides, they fully supports the new Direct2D API – enabling enhanced 2D graphics features, and anti-aliased text to make applications running under the • Windows 7 desktop look amazingly smooth and readable. source http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15614/1/

[Rumour] ATI Cypress (Radeon 5800) Performance charts, Evergreen release dates/price information

Published on Tuesday, September 15 2009 9:37 am by Sub

A flurry of Cypress images have leaked today on the web. But here are some big ones – all originating from Chiphell and gathering.tweakers.net. Click on the links for the full sized charts.

5870 vs. GTX 295
5870 vs. GTX 285
5850 vs. GTX 285
3DMark Vantage Charts
5870 vs. GTX 295 detailed benchmarks
5850 vs. GTX 285 detailed benchmarks
5870 CF vs. GTX 295 QSLI detailed benchmarks

Of course, these are unofficial, and should be taken with a grain of salt. The 5870 competes well with the dual-GPU GTX 295, ending up faster in most situations. The 5850 is 30% faster than GTX 285 on average, the current fastest single GPU product. A recurring pattern seems to be exceptional 8xAA performance for the Cypress GPUs. Also, it is interesting to note that the GTX 295 is actually faster in many of the lower resolutions, whereas at higher resolutions/extreme IQ, the 5870 is universally ahead. It may be a bit of a non-issue, as both cards are returning monster frame rates at those lower resolutions for most games. The 5850 beats the GTX 285 comfortably in each and every test, at every resolution, and in most situations with eye-popping deltas. Finally, we have a shoot-out between 2×5870 in Crossfire and 2xGTX 295 in Quad-SLI. The 5870 CF solution takes an easy victory across the board, aided by poor SLI scaling moving past 2 GPUs for the GTX 295. Here’s an interesting statistic – Crysis Warhead, 2560×1600, 4xAA, 8xAF, 42 fps. The 5870 CF figures also indicate where GT300 needs to be. A quick calculation suggests Nvidia requires about 2.5x GT200b (GTX 285) performance out of GT300 to compete with Hemlock. There are plenty of situations where the dual 5870 setup ends up three times as fast as GTX 285. Granted, Hemlock might end up downclocked to maintain a 300W TDP, this is also assuming Hemlock uses a straight Crossfire connector between the two Cypress dies.

Another interesting slide leaks ATI’s “Sweet Spot Strategy”. Cypress covers the area between $250 and $350. So far, the rumoured $299/$399 price points have been based on the assumption of <$400 for the HD 5870. It is quite possible that the 1GB versions of 5850/5870 will end up at $249 and $349, respectively, with the 2GB HD 5870 “Eyefinity/SIX” version at $399. Also, it doesn’t seem like a “bottom-to-top” generation launch after all. The HD 5800 series releases on 23rd September, “Hemlock” dual-Cypress and “Juniper” (HD 5700 series) around the same time frame in October, at maximum price points of $499 and $199 respectively. The entry level Redwood and Cedar only come in Q1 2010, which may explain the lack of any details. Once again, this slide is unofficial and could easily have been doctored, so only time will tell.

Reference: Chiphell, Gathering.tweakers.net

source:

http://vr-zone.com/articles/-rumour-ati-cypress-radeon-5800-performance-charts-evergreen-release-dates-price-information/7647.html?doc=7647

HD 5870 performance comparison tips up

HD 5870 performance comparison tips up

Written by Fudzilla staff

Tuesday, 15 September 2009 09:55

Some new photos as well The Czechs did it again. Some HD 5870 performance numbers have popped up on czechgamer.com, and it seems the new Radeon is quite a performer. In Hawks DX10.1 it outperforms the HD 4890 by around 60 percent, just like Fudo predicted a few weeks back. Things look even worse for the GTX 285 which ends up twice as slow as the HD 5870. However, bear in mind this is a DX10.1 title, so take the numbers with a grain of salt. In 3Dmark Vantage the HD 5870 is around 40 percent faster than the GTX 285 and around 60 percent faster than an HD 4890. The HD 5870 is around 17 percent faster than the HD 4870X2 in both tests. The HD 5870 certainly offers a major improvement over the old RV7xx generation, but we’re expecting Nvidia’s so-called GT300 to offer an even bigger boost over current Nvidia cards. You can see the benchmarks here, and a few photos of what is supposedly a stripped down 5870 here. source: http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15508/1/

AMD releases new Catalyst 9.9

Written by Slobodan Simic

Monday, 14 September 2009 11:53

A few minor tweaks AMD has released a new version of its Catalyst driver, the 9.9. The new driver supports Radeon HD 2000, HD 3000 and HD 4000 series card and only features some minor tweaks. The new driver doesn’t bring any new features and even the new .inf file doesn’t include the new HD 5800 series card that should come out on September 22/23rd, depending on the region. It looks like the next Catalyst driver is the important one as the 9.9 brings anti-aliasing support for Ghostbusters game, ATI CrossfireX for Resident Evil 5 and a fix for graphics corruption in Sims 3 game. The rest of the new tweaks include fix for CCC which now responds properly after exiting quick adjust video settings, edge enhancement and de-noise sliders in Catalyst Control Center which no longer lags or appear out of sync with mouse movement, proper HDMI detection as DTV (HDMI) instead of DTV (DVI) when the HDMI display is hot-plugged for the first time and some minor tweaks with Cyberlink’s MediaShow Espresso after transcoding process. The rest of the bug fixes and tweaks can be found in release notes here where you can also find the driver as well.

ATI’s HD 5870 smiles for the camera

Written by Slobodan Simic

Thursday, 10 September 2009 16:15

Shots being pulled due to NDA AMD’s Cypress card had a short celebrity moment this morning, but as AMD likes its Evergreen to be as shy as it could be, the pictures are being pulled off the net by AMD spinners. The HD 5870, known as the Cypress, has posed for a few a bit blurry shots and have been posted at tweakers.net forum but it was pulled off due to “unknown” reason. The guys from Czech site pctuning.tyden.cz apparently don’t have NDA problems on their hands and have posted those pictures as well as some other from the AMD presentation. (Next time I’m in Prague, you guys can count on a few rounds of Kozels. sub.ed.) We already wrote a lot of details about the new Evergreen series, and this Cypress card has 1600 shaders, works at 825MHz for the core and will be available with either 1 or 2GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 5.2GHz. The cooler looks at least more serious than the one on the HD 4770 and has a rather small back exhaust thanks to two DVI, HDMI and Displayport connectors. This is of course AMD’s reference design and we are quite sure that AIB partners will eventually come up with its own solutions, at least once AMD gives them a green light. Here are the mentioned pictures. Also read Radeon HD 5870 has 1600 shaders RV870 pricing and name revealed Radeon HD 5870 X2 comes later Radeon HD 5850 is a 725MHz chip Source: http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15454/1/