Posted on Wednesday, September 23 2009 @ 17:17 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Sapphire introduced its Radeon HD 5870 and Radeon HD 5850 cards. The 5870 is bundled with a coupon for DiRT 1 and Battlestations: Pacific.
The SAPPHIRE HD 5870 is based on an advanced new graphics architecture from the ATI division of AMD, the second generation of GPU to be built in its 40nm process. This is the very first series of graphics solutions to support the forthcoming DirectX 11, soon to be introduced with Windows 7 and supported in Windows Vista.
With a new 150GB/s memory interface supporting fifth generation GDDR5 memory and a new architecture with a total of 1600 stream processors and 80 texture units* the HD 5870 has twice the computing power of the previous generation. It will be lightning fast with existing DirectX10.1, DirectX 10 and DirectX 9.0 games and applications – but where it excels will be in new releases of software using DirectX 11 where it will support stunning new levels of detail, transparency and lighting effects. All of this comes with the modest active power consumption of less that 190W – and using Dynamic Power Management the card has a new super low-power idle mode at 27W.
At the same time, SAPPHIRE will introduce the SAPPHIRE HD 5850, with the slightly smaller configuration of 1440 stream processors and 72 texture units offering users access to the same new generation technology and full DirectX 11 support at a lower price point.
