n the world of video cards it’s always about the chicken and the egg. On the one hand video cards need to support standards like DirectX 11 and OpenGL 3.2, on the other hand having a card release before there are games that take advantage of the new features it supports means that the cards mostly use the improved performance they bring to improve image quality which isn’t a bad thing at all to do. ATI has a hit with the Radeon HD 5870 as it is the only card along with the HD 5850 coming next week to fully support Microsoft’s DirectX 11 until either the end of the year or next year. The Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 card is clocked at the default clock speeds which provide plenty of performance for every game out there today and if you want more performance get a second card. This card comes with a coupon for Dirt 2 which is the first DirectX 11 game coming in December. As this the only HD 5870 card I have reviewed and it performs almost as fast as a GTX295 which is NVIDIA’s dual GPU card and faster than the GTX285 which was the previous fastest card on the market, I give the Sapphire card the Editor’s Choice for those wanting a fast video card with support for the future DirectX 11 games and support for Eyefinity, allowing up to 3 monitors to be utilized at the same time on this card. The card is available online for $379, making it a great deal for today’s and tomorrow’s games as the competition has nothing available right now.
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