AMD: Kicking Ass and Taking Names (HD5 Series)

[legionaire45]

You'll probably need to take a mortgage out to pay for the entire set up, but hot damn...
In short:

• ATI's Evergreen GPUs (The HD 5 Series) will support up to 6 "High Resolution" monitors at a given time.
• Support for up to 24 High Resolution monitors when in quad-crossfire.
• Support for resolutions of up to 268 Megapixels (I believe on a single card), which is close to the resolution of a 90 degree arch of human vision.
• The new cards are capable of doing 2.5 ~2.7 TeraFLOPS Single Precision. Compare that to the last gen HD4890 which, IIRC, could pull off 1.2 TeraFLOPS.
• ~2.1 ~2.7 ~2.1 Billion Transistors on a 40nm process
• Mobile versions of these GPUs will also support this technology
• Other things we know about like DirectX 11 support, etc.

Announced/Leaked SKU's ( 1 | 2 | 3 ):

1. Radeon HD 5870 X2 - $???
2. Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity Edition - $???
3. Radeon HD 5870 2GB - $449
4. Radeon HD 5870 1GB - $399
5. Radeon HD 5850 - $299
6. Radeon HD 5770 - $???
7. Radeon HD 5750 - $???

Leaked/Notable shots:
Radeon HD5870 X2:

Others:










As more information is released I'll try to keep this thread up to date.

Personally, I wouldn't mind going for 6 Projectors and lighting up a gigantic wall with Halo. Something the size of a building. Something you could see from a plane. Grossly overkill for Halo. But I think that would be amusing.


Nvidia's response?

“The gaming world has moved to dynamic realism, which depicts actual physical movement more realistically than ever before. For example, the No. 1 PC game coming out next week is ‘Batman: Arkham Assyum,’ which takes advantage of graphics plus physics to give it extraordinary realism. Because we support GPU-accelerated physics, our $129 card that’s shipping today is faster than their new RV870 (code name for new AMD chips) that sells for $399.”

Translation: "BAWW."
Besides the fact that what they are saying is highly misleading at the least and probably entirely wrong, it doesn't say anything about actual processing power. Not only is Nvidia going to be late to the game with their next gen GPU, but they'll also be doing it WRONG. With the amount of horsepower on RV870, PhysX isn't going to matter. Max the resolution, AA, AF and everything else on the RV870 and you'll be winning in the long run - try that on the "$140 Nvidia card" which is either some derivative of the G92 from 2007 or the crappy GT200-based budget card that Nvidia had extreme difficulty in making. This is before you take into account the fact that the RV870 can handle multiple monitors seamlessly, while Nvidia barely has SLI working with 2 monitors.

Nvidia is really fucked. They aren't going to have anything to respond to this with for a long time. The design they do have is flawed. They've really fucked themselves. For the sake of the market, I hope that Jen Hsun Huang gets kicked out of the company. He's totally lost it at this point. Nvidia needs to get with the times or they are going to become the next 3dfx and ATI will have nobody to compete with in the graphics market until Intel finally releases Larrabee.

...Now if only AMD would start treating CPU development the same way they are currently treating their GPU development...

[Amit]

With all those monitors...Freelancer may now commence creaming his pants.

Holy shit, omg WTF?

[Phopojijo]

1) ATI paper release
2) Look at GPGPU numbers -- ~2x the performance of last generation... which is typical for ANY GPU generation.
3) Charlie at the Inquirer hates nVidia.

[flibitijibibo]

First: What Phopo said.

Second: Uh... I may be a supporter of multiple monitors, but that's taking it way too far, even if it is a tech demo. It's annoying enough to have those spaces between the monitors, but to have a fucking grid in all of your games is obnoxious. That old Alienware supermonitor needs to come out of prototype hell.

Third: So NVidia doesn't have anything to compete right off the bat. Wah wah. I'd rather wait to have a piece of hardware that's not only good, but isn't a rushed out piece of shit that was released just to get a couple extra bucks.

Fourth: The last time a card was released for the latest version of DirectX, it worked like shit. Note how all of these demos are running DX9/10 games. I'll even wager that it's not even running DX11 software on the OS. Again, I'd rather wait, because by the time DX11 runs the way it's supposed to (or even gets anything that supports it), NVidia will at least have something to put on the table.

[Xetsuei]

LOL

Look at all the whiners.

And all the incorrectness.

[legionaire45]

1) ATI paper release
2) Look at GPGPU numbers -- ~2x the performance of last generation... which is typical for ANY GPU generation.
3) Charlie at the Inquirer hates nVidia.

1) Cards based off of this tech are being released with Windows 7 - the release date is supposed to be October 23rd. This isn't a release announcement - in fact, I don't think they have even announced the name of it yet. Most people are assuming it will keep the same naming scheme as before.
2) Regardless of whether it is predicted or not, it's still notable. That isn't really the point anyway since numbers like these don't magically equal performance anyway. From the looks of it, ATI has a damned good part on it's hands and drivers to match.
3) Charlie at the Inquirer has good reason to hate Nvidia. Besides the fact that they are deceptive bastards who make an art of screwing customers over to save their own ass, their chip development has been atrocious for the past several generations. Even as far back as the Geforce 5 series they have been deceptive about their products. Nvidia deserves all the criticism it is getting.

First: What Phopo said.

Second: Uh... I may be a supporter of multiple monitors, but that's taking it way too far, even if it is a tech demo. It's annoying enough to have those spaces between the monitors, but to have a fucking grid in all of your games is obnoxious. That old Alienware supermonitor needs to come out of prototype hell.

Third: So NVidia doesn't have anything to compete right off the bat. Wah wah. I'd rather wait to have a piece of hardware that's not only good, but isn't a rushed out piece of shit that was released just to get a couple extra bucks.

Fourth: The last time a card was released for the latest version of DirectX, it worked like shit. Note how all of these demos are running DX9/10 games. I'll even wager that it's not even running DX11 software on the OS. Again, I'd rather wait, because by the time DX11 runs the way it's supposed to (or even gets anything that supports it), NVidia will at least have something to put on the table.

2) Note that they mention that they are working with Samsung to produce monitors with thin bezels. Yes, there is still a bezel but seriously, who cares? Unless you set this up in a way that you have a bezel in the middle of your screen, it's not much of an issue, even in first person shooters.

3) ATI has had most of the DirectX11 feature set implemented since way back when the HD2900 was released. In fact, tessellation, mandatory AA (IIRC, a feature of DX10.1) and most of that other crap was originally a part of DX10 before a certain competitor bitched to Microsoft about it since they couldn't get it to work with their design or something. And enjoy your oddball 2880 x 900 pixel resolution on your one-off Alienware curvy monitor.

4) I may be stoned or something, but IIRC, Nvidia released the first DX10 card, the 8800 GTX and the 8800 GTS. Based off of the G80 Core, not only was it popular, but it forced ATI to completely rethink the way they designed their GPUs. This is why we have had amazing $200-$300 GPUs for the past 2 or 3 generations. Just because it's a first gen part doesn't mean it will suck. And actually, Nvidia probably won't be able to put much on the table because they are apparently focusing on GPGPU over DirectX 11. Sure, they have a design that theoretically is more general purpose, but general purpose is always going to be at least a little bit slower than dedicated hardware. ATI's architecture also has many general purpose areas but these are supported by dedicated hardware for things like tessellation.

What really matters about RV870 is the fact that it is flexible enough to do all of this. How many people are really going to use something that excessive with their computers? I don't see many people spending ~$24,000 on an array of Twenty-four 30" LCDs to go along with their $1200 graphics cards.

This thing can pull off 80FPS in WoW at a resolution of 76xx x 3200. It can play Hawx nicely on three screens using a single card without any messy directX hacks or a special box on the back. Imagine what you could do with a single card and a single screen.

[AAA]

It's not unnecessary, AT ALL, to say "I love you legionaire".


..........and I do.

[Kornman00]

Glad this is coming out this year. That way when I build my new computer next year, there will either be a wider selection, more stable or just a little cheaper

I really don't understand why PC game developers don't start developing split-screen for the PC. It's a dying habit for the console, but with this, shit, you could do six-player co-op...potentially 24 player! Wow, imagine that, all on a single machine. No latency! At least no latency due to networking anyways.

If the next generation of consoles don't support some kind of multi-output system, I'd be surprised.

[Cojafoji]

stock piling of cash commences: now.

[flibitijibibo]

Yeah, the 8800GTX was out first, and people only used it on XP because it was basically broken in Vista for the first year.

I didn't know about the other DX11 implementations though. Maybe this won't be filled with AIDS off the bat.

Hopefully if Alienware brings the monitor back to life, it'll be 3 1920x1200s, or at least 1280x1024.