Ati radeon hd 5870 - Ati News!

AMD has presented their new top-of-the-line model in the beginning of this month, with the name of HD4890, placing itself in a slightly superior position than the previous HD4870.

In order to counteract the boost in performance that nVidia has achieved with their 55nm fabrication process, and the launch of the GeForce GTX 295, which had no rivals in ATI models, ATI had to find a quick solution to keep up with the competition, and the HD4890 seemed like a good option.

Months bfore the initial launch, there was much speculation on how the new ATI proposal based on the RV790 could have been, and there were rumors of a higher number of stream processors or even a 512Bit memory controller. But it seemed unlikely that AMD would create a whole new CPU, first because of the costs involved, and the fact that the new GPU is already being projected.

AMD has thus decided to enhance the current GPU performance, with low costs and a very high performances, while waiting for the next generation of graphic cards.

Even though the unofficial versions were leaked a few days ago, AMD has published the official update for the Catalyst drivers, arriving to the 9.8 version. The American company promises great performances with the new drivers, and support to OpenGL 3.1, RHEL 4.8 and Ubuntu 9.04. Also a number of enhancements and corrections in some gaming titles. For example, with Company of Heroes, the advantage is of 77%.

The control panel is now also compatible with RandR API 1.2 for multiple screen management.The new drivers can be downloaded from ATI’s official website.

Sapphire, one of the main partners from ATI has announced a mainstream card based on the Radeon HD 4650 featuring the AGP 8x connection. The card will be available in the 512 and 1024MB versions, with DDR2 memories and a blue-colored PCB with a single-slot active cooling system.

AS for the power supply, in order to overcome the limitation of the AGP slot (40W), Sapphire used a 6-pin PCI-express connector. Other technical specifications feature a clock frequency of 600Mhz and 800Mhz for the memories.

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