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Sid2
 
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2010-01-14 22:09:27

The ATI Radeon HD 5670 gives many owners of lower-priced mainstream desktops the option of boosting graphics performance without spending a lot of money. DirectX 11 ships with Windows 7, but can also be installed in Vista.

AMD's latest graphics cards provide the horsepower needed to play mainstream video games. The Radeon HD 5670 includes AMD's ATI Eyefinity technology, which supports up to three displays, providing at least one has a DisplayPort connector.

Pricing for the Radeon HD 5670 starts at $99 for 512 MB of GDDR5 memory. AMD's major rival is Nvidia, which makes the GeForce line.

Among the key features in DirectX 11 is tessellation technology that enables game developers to create smoother, less blocky, and more organic looking objects. Tessellation is a technique used to manage and divide data sets so they can be rendered by a graphics engine.

Other features include a "compute shader" that allows programmers to treat the GPU in a much less graphics-oriented way, and more like a highly parallel CPU, making programming easier. Finally, DirectX 11 is much more efficient at using the power of the multiple cores in today's CPUs.

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Sid2
 
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2010-01-15 12:46:06




Sid2
 
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2010-01-15 12:58:42




With a suggested retail price of $99, the Radeon HD 5670 being evaluated today needs to be powerful if it's going to offer value in the most competitive price segment known to the world of discrete GPUs.

After all, ATI's Radeon HD 5670 will be doing battle against the less-expensive GeForce 9600 GT, the somewhat more modern GeForce GT 240, and Nvidia's aging GeForce 9800 GT.

Not only that, but the card will also have to stave off old favorites, like the existing Radeon HD 4770, GeForce GTS 250, and Radeon HD 4850 models, all of which can be found as low as $110 online (sometimes less, if you're lucky).



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Video Card Benchmarks

Sid2
 
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2010-01-15 13:28:45


The HD 5670 is a heck of a card. Just like the mega high-end HD 5970 X2 it has support for Eyefinity that allows you to spread your display over multiple monitors, ATI Stream support to allows the GPU to carry out non-graphics related tasks, as well as support for Microsoft’s latest DirectX 11 graphics engine.

Power-wise, there’s a fair gulf between the HD 5670 and its HD 5970 X2 big brother. That said, you get power that you could only have dreamt about a few years ago:


  • 620 gigaflops
  • 775 MHz core clock
  • 400 stream processors
  • 512MB or 1GB of GDDR5 RAM running at 4 Gbps
  • 627 million transistors
  • Peak power consumption of 61W of power (and around 14W when the card is at idle).





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Sid2
 
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2010-01-15 14:48:09
last modified: 2010-01-15 15:45:48

PoorBoy has noted that the 5670 only supports single precision. . . so it is apparently useless for BOINC purposes.


Speeds & Feeds


  • Engine clock speed: 775 MHz

  • Processing power (single precision): 620 GigaFLOPS

  • Polygon throughput: 775M polygons/sec
  • Data fetch rate (32-bit): 62 billion fetches/sec
  • Texel fill rate (bilinear filtered): 15.5 Gigatexels/sec
  • Pixel fill rate: 6.2 Gigapixels/sec
  • Anti-aliased pixel fill rate: 24.8 Gigasamples/sec
  • Memory clock speed: 1.0 GHz
  • Memory data rate: 4.0 Gbps
  • Memory bandwidth: 64 GB/sec
  • Maximum board power: 64 Watts
  • Idle board power: 15 Watts



ATI Radeonâ„¢ HD 5670 Graphics




. . . it sounded too good to be true. . . .







Rakarin
 
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2010-01-16 14:57:09

Sid2 wrote:
PoorBoy has noted that the 5670 only supports single precision. . . so it is apparently useless for BOINC purposes.
. . . it sounded too good to be true. . . .


Still, there are decent CUDA cards that are near that price, especially if you can find a sale. I got my nVidia 9800 GT for $128. Quadra and Fermi cards will drive the lower end prices down.

Not to hijack a thread, but which is better for BOINC? With Folding, better throughput seems to be on the CUDA side. Historically, there are some significant differences between the two manufacturer architectures. ATI always ran 24-bit processors on the GPU, while Nvidia (I'm still used to capital "V", old habits...) ran 32-bit processors. Early GPGPU studies always used Nvidia for that reason.

Also, the two companies took approaches similar to the CISC / RISC processor split. ATI has optimized libraries for everything. There are libraries, and versions of libraries, for shading, rendering, moving, lighting, cross-lighting, glows, super-intelligent shades of the color blue, etc. While the GPU is slower and 24-bit, a programmer can call an optimized library and get a significant speed boost for that function. Nvidia, however, had fewer specialized functions and focused on a faster GPU. More was done by the GPU, which required more load but was done by a faster GPU. That also lessened reliance on specific versions of specific functions. This also helped Nvidia in GPGPU projects, as developers could rely on a more robust processor, rather than forcing data into specific optimized library formats.

Mike
Sid2
 
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2010-01-16 15:13:23



Rakarin:

Your technical explanations are very informative and much appreciated.

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