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...