AMD today officially launched its next-generation ATI Radeon HD 5800 series graphics cards ('Cypress'), the world;s first to fully support Microsoft DirectX 11, the new gaming and compute standard shipping shortly with Microsoft Windows 7 operating system. Boasting up to 2.72 TeraFLOPS of compute power, the ATI Radeon HD 5800 series deliver twice the performance-per-dollar of previous generations of graphics products, according to AMD.

AMD will initially release two cards: the ATI Radeon HD 5870 and the ATI Radeon HD 5850, each with 1GB GDDR5 memory. With the ATI Radeon HD 5800 series of graphics cards, PC users can expand their computing experience with ATI Eyefinity multi-display technology, accelerate their computing experience with ATI Stream technology, and enjoy higher gaming performance and full support of Microsoft DirectX 11.



"With the ATI Radeon HD 5800 series of graphics cards driven by the most powerful processor on the planet, AMD is changing the game, both in terms of performance and the experience," said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Products Group, AMD. "As the first to market with full DirectX 11 support, an unmatched experience made possible with ATI Eyefinity technology, and ATI Stream technology harnessing open standards designed to help make Windows 7 that much better, I can say with confidence that AMD is the undisputed leader in graphics once more."



Modeled on the full DirectX 11 specifications, the ATI Radeon HD 5800 series of graphics cards delivers up to 2.72 TeraFLOPS of compute power in a single card, translating to superior performance in the latest DirectX 11 games, as well as in DirectX 9, DirectX 10, DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL titles in single card configurations or multi-card configurations using ATI CrossFireX technology. When measured in terms of performance experienced in some of today?s most popular games, the ATI Radeon HD 5800 series is up to twice as fast as the closest competing product in its class, allowing gamers to enjoy incredible new DirectX 11 games ? including the forthcoming DiRT 2 from Codemasters, and Aliens vs. Predator from Rebellion, and updated version of The Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online Eberron Unlimited from Turbine.

The ATI Radeon HD 5800 series of graphics cards is two generations ahead of DirectX 10.0 support, and features 6th generation evolved AMD tessellation technology, 3rd generation evolved GDDR5 support, 2nd generation evolved 40nm process technology, and a feature-rich compute shader.

The DirectX 11 API was developed on AMD graphics hardware and represents the cornerstone of DirectX 11 gaming. All initial DirectX 11 games were developed and/or continue to be developed on AMD DirectX 11 hardware. More than 20 DirectX 11 games are currently in development, according to AMD.

Windows 7 is the first compute-capable operating system and the ATI Radeon HD 5800 series of graphics cards with ATI Stream technology accelerate it like nothing else, being the first and only card to support DirectCompute 11.

Users can also arrange one to three displays using the ATI Radeon HD 5870 and ATI Radeon HD 5850 graphics cards, or up to six displays using the forthcoming ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity graphics card, in a variety of configurations - any mix of portrait or landscape.

The ATI Radeon HD 5800 series of graphics cards is supported by a dozen add-in-board companies, including ASUS, Club 3D, Diamond Multimedia, Force3D, GIGABYTE, HIS (Hightech Information Systems), MSI, Multimedia, PowerColor, SAPPHIRE Technology, VisionTek and XFX.

AMD also talked provided details about its GPU roadmap for 2009-2010. This inlcudes the "Cypress", "Hemlock" and the "Juniper" GPUS for 2009 and the "Redwood" and "Cedar" for Q1 of 2010.

	ATI Radeon HD 5850	ATI Radeon HD 5870
Engine clock speed:	725 MHz	850 MHz
Processing power (single precision)	2.09 TeraFLOPS	2.72 TeraFLOPS
Processing power (double precision)	418 GigaFLOPS	544 GigaFLOPS
Polygon throughput	725M polygons/sec	850M polygons/sec
Data fetch rate (32-bit)	209 billion fetches/sec	272 billion fetches/sec
Texel fill rate (bilinear filtered)	52.2 Gigatexels/sec	68 Gigatexels/sec
Pixel fill rate	23.2 Gigapixels/sec	27.2 Gigapixels/sec
Anti-aliased pixel fill rate	92.8 Gigasamples/sec	108.8 Gigasamples/sec
Memory clock speed	1 GHz	1.2 GHz
Memory data rate	4.0 Gbps	4.8 Gbps
Memory bandwidth	128 GB/sec	153.6 GB/sec
Maximum board power	151 Watts	188 Watts
Idle board power	27 Watts	27 Watts
Stream Processing Units	1440	1600
Texture Units	72	80
Z/Stencil ROP Units	128	128
Color ROP Units	32	32
Bus interface	PCI Express 2.1 x16	PCI Express 2.1 x16
Integrated dual-link DVI output with HDCP	Yes
Integrated DisplayPort output	Yes
Integrated HDMI 1.3 output with Deep Color, xvYCC wide gamut support, and high bit-rate audio	Yes
3D stereoscopic display/glasses support	Yes
Integrated HD audio controller	Output protected high bit rate 7.1 channel surround sound over HDMI with no additional cables required Supports AC-3, AAC, Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio formats
Other features	DirectX 11 support Shader Model 5.0 DirectCompute 11 Programmable hardware tessellation unit Accelerated multi-threading HDR texture compression Order-independent transparency OpenGL 3.2 support Image quality enhancement technology Up to 24x multi-sample and super-sample anti-aliasing modes Adaptive anti-aliasing 16x angle independent anisotropic texture filtering 128-bit floating point HDR rendering ATI Eyefinity multi-display technology2,3 Three independent display controllers Drive three displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls, and video overlays Display grouping Combine multiple displays to behave like a single large display ATI Stream acceleration technology OpenCL 1.0 compliant DirectCompute 11 Double precision floating point processing support Accelerated video encoding, transcoding, and upscaling Native support for common video encoding instructions ATI CrossFireX multi-GPU technology6 Dual, triple, and quad GPU scaling Dual-channel bridge interconnect