Introduction
01
AMD seems to be on to a winner in recent months. In September 2009 its
graphics arm, ATI, released the DX11
Radeon
HD 5870
GPU. A neater, cleaner design than the decent Radeon HD 4000-series,
the £300 card is our choice for readers looking for a
high-end
gaming card that has practically all the bases covered.
A week later, the company released the trimmed-down
Radeon
HD 5850,
ostensibly the same GPU but with reduced clock-speeds and a slight snip
of the architecture. Move forward again by a couple of weeks and the
mid-range
Radeon
HD 5770
and 5750 filled out the
£100-£150 space.
NVIDIA, AMD's only rival in the discrete GPU market, appears to be
focussing efforts elsewhere, with its next-generation
Fermi
architecture, designed to
compete with Radeon HD 5870, being pushed
farther back into 2010.
As AMD and NVIDIA are all too acutely aware, designing GPUs is an
inherently expensive business, so Intel has 'lent' a helping hand by
agreeing to pay AMD
$1.25bn
(£750m) in damages,
primarily due for engaging in some rather
naughty business practices on the chip giant's part.
However, things aren't as rosy as they could be. General stock of
Radeon HD 58x0 cards is abysmal, to say the least, and, focusing on a
niche market, the Radeon HD 5870's claim of being the best graphics
card in town can be disputed by the long-in-the-tooth NVIDIA GeForce
GTX 295.
Set against a backdrop of high-end GPU wars, AMD has readied the
graphics card that it believes will hold the performance crown for a
while to come. More of a show pony than pragmatic volume-earner, we
welcome the Radeon HD 5970 2,048MB.
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