New Ati Card - Ati Bloggo News 2010!

The RV830 is hence “half” of the Juniper GPU, the one implemented on the HD 5750 and HD 5770. The number of transistors goes in fact from 1.04 billion to 627 million: in this way, the company has reduced the die size that is currently smaller than the RV730.

Even with the smaller size, the same features that came with the first HD 5000 series cards are present: UVD2 still handles the video decoding for high-definition content, and the Eyefinity controller manages the multi-screen mode, guaranteeing support up to 3 monitors simultaneously.

The card

The card presents itself with a different layout than the reference board: the main feature on the Vapor-x series from Sapphire is the different cooling system. As it can be seen in the picture, Sapphire has decided to use its own heatsink, with the Vapor chamber technology. The fan has been placed in the center, blowing air directly on the heatsink.

No changes on the connection ports: not only the two DVI outputs are present, but also an HDMI and a DisplayPort. This card supports the Eyefinity technology, which allows the card to connect up to 3 different monitors, also with 3D applications.

The possible uses to the ATI Eyefinity are almost endless. The displays can be configured in many ways: for example, three monitors can be placed to create a portrait or landscape mode; one can be placed in horizontal, and two in vertical; six monitors in the same row, or even in two rows of three each.

The interesting thing is that using more than one graphic card in CrossFire mode, users can connect even up to 24 monitors. But were the old limits overcome? This could be a valid question: are there support from applications and videogames or there will be a very few limited number of titles compatible with it?

The benefits available with a Radeon HD 5870 or HD 5850 are very interesting. In games, it’s possible to obtain a bigger visual that can help spotting an enemy first, or just enjoying a great panorama.

Also productivity applications such as video editing or image manipulation could benefit from it; at the same time, it would be possible to have different information available on-screen, or manage different applications at the same time: news, stock market, browser, multimedia player, word-processing applications and so on.

ATI Eyefinity

Behind the ATI Eyefinity trademark, thre’s a technology that when explained briefly, doesn’t really seem anything new: it allows users to plug more than one monitor to the graphic card and use them in different ways. Going into detail, however, we find out that there are some innovations, also thanks to the current technological scenario, that are very different from what Matrox had when they annunced their TripleHead2GO multi-monitor technology, for example.

Thanks to the ATI Eyefinity, the Radeon HD 5800 family can manage 3 monitors with the maximum resolution of 2560 x 1600 pixels for a total of 4800 x 2560, or even 6 if talking about the special version of the cards, called ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity6 Edition. We’ll see in the next articles how different this technology is from other multi-monitor technologies.