Ati radeon hd 5870 - Ati News!

According to the latest rumors, ATI would be ready to launch the first DirectX 11 video cards in the same time as Microsoft would launch the new Windows 7 OS, that integrates the new DX11 APIs.

If those rumors are correct, then the ATI RV870 should be launched on the market on the first half of October. With this launch, ATI should arrive to the DX11 before nVIDIA, without really introducing anything new or revolutionary, though. In fact, the RV870 will be DX11 and feature a bigger number of shaders than the current ATI proposals, but will basically be using concepts already used on the RV770.

The new ATI models will be manufactured at 40nm and it will allow the chip to work at higher frequencies and have a bigger number of transistors.

AMD is apparently working on a new card that should be called Ati Radeon HD 4790. This solution should be based on the RV790 core (only used on the HD4890 so far), manufactured at 55nm. The intention from AMD seems to be manufacturing a card better than the HD4770 and slightly faster than the HD4850. Of course, we ask ourselves why the card should be called HD4790 instead of HD4860, but we digress.

The new card should have a core with 600Mhz frequency, inferior to the 635Mhz of the HD4850 and 512MB of GDDR5 RAM working at 800Mhz (3200Mhz effective). The memory interface should be 256bit.

The price is not known so far, but it should be placed in between the HD4850 and HD4870.

AMD has made the version 9.6 of their Catalyst drivers available for download. Those drivers are compatible with the graphic cards from the ATI Radeon HD 2000 series on; the support to other versions of Radeon graphic cards wasn’t yet implemented.

The new drivers offer a few optimizations on the performance, but no new specific feature that wasn’t found on the previous versions. There are definitely fps increase on the HD4000 series and optimizations on the CrossFire X configurations, however.

As we reach the end of this brief testing, we can say that the ATI Radeon HD 4650 is a good card that delivers what it promises, although the performances cannot place it on the top list of cards. The video/photo editing are done easily with this card and it helps reducing the workload on the CPU and the passive cooling system keeps the temperature at decent levels.

The gaming performance is dependable on the quality chosen, at medium-low quality, the games run decently well and present no compatibility issue.

The main problem with this card isn’t much the card itself, but the fact that the HD 4670 costs just a little bit more and offers better performance. For the rest, the card is recommended to those that don’t need a graphic card for extreme gaming, but still want a card that can deliver moderate performances.

The performances with the recent games were in general discreet. At a standard resolution (1360×768 or 1280×720 letterbox mode), it’s possible to have a good resolution and keep video performances in an acceptable level, with AA 4x and only AF 2x.

With this configuration, most FPS kept an average of 30/40fps, while for Need for Speed Undercover and Moto GP, the graphic performances were even better, without slowing down or chopping graphics. On Fallout 3, with the resolution at 1920×1080 and the same antialiasing and anisotropic filter, the performances decreased to half, staying at 15/20fps.

The card performs greatly when it comes to high-definition movie playing, both from the hard-disk and the BluRay: the card doesn’t have an HDMI exit but the double DVI/VGA allows users to connect it to a full HD TV that supports the 1920×1080 resolution.

Now onto the gaming section, we have to warn those users that cannot play games unless they have a constant 60 fps rate with high resolution and filters: if that’s your case, then this isn’t the card for you. Those users that are looking for a good GPU that will offer decent performances in all areas, and allows the most recent games to be played at a decent rate, although not at the maximum settings, then perhaps this review will help.

The first testing that the card underwent was when using Photoshop: going from the less complex operations from the most complex ones such as JPEG file modification and RAW, and the card performed pretty well.

As for the video-editing/playback, the HD 4650 also behaves well and has greatly reduced the workload from the CPU; this fact enhanced the system’s multi-tasking performance, and allowed us to use the browser with many open windows, chat programs, Torrent and text editor while converting full HD videos (1080p).

If you’re looking for a cheap graphic card that is able to keep a good quality, the ATI Radeon HD 4650 is a good choice. It features a 600Mhz GPU together with 512MB of DDR2 RAM. The 4650 isn’t exactly a top-of-the-line card, but it justifies its value when it comes to the price/performance ratio.

We classify this card as “good” because “excellent” can’t really be said of it: with a little more money, users can buy the HD 4670 that has 20% more performance thanks to the DDR3 RAM and the 700MHz processor.

At the Computex 2009 in Taipei, AMD has shown a 300mm “wafer” containing the first new generation GPU’s, compatible with DirectX 11. Those are chips manufactured with a 40nm process and known so far as RV870 and indicated by AMD with the codename “Evergreen”. Unfortunately, the details released are very few, but the new chip should arrive on the market together with Microsoft’s new Operational System, Windows 7.

AMD has also shown a few demo videos on the DirectX 11 features, such as SM 5.0, tesselation, Multithreaded Rendering and Compute Shaders.

ATI has announced the new GPU ATI Radeon E4690, developed for embedded systems (such as arcades, casino systems, etc). According to the company, the E4690 is capable of three times the performance of the previous embedded products.

The E4690 suppors the Microsoft DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL 3.0. It integrates the second generation of the Unified Video Decoder (UVD 2.9) and features 512MB of GDDR3 RAM with 700 Mhz frequency.