Last week’s launch of the HD 5870 and the first DirectX 11 video card has caused a fundamental shift in video cards until at least next year. Until that launch, NVIDIA chips had the performance crown for the single GPU video card market in terms of performance. One could argue about the necessity of DirectX 11 hardware in 2009 as only one game, Dirt 2 is scheduled to be released that supports it this year in December, but the fact that ATI has launched the ultimate performer WITH DirectX 11 support means that the choice for someone wanting the highest performing video card on the market today really isn’t much of a choice at all.
XFX started selling ATI cards late last year with the launch of their HD 4890 series. As you might know, XFX has been a long-time seller of NVIDIA based video cards but the market and the economy forced XFX to diversify. Today they sell both NVIDIA and ATI based video cards. ATI launched their HD 5870 at the $379 price point, but that leaves a wide market for video cards under $300. The HD 5850 which is based on the same chip as the HD 5870 but with less SPs and memory bandwidth is less but the performance should be excellent. Today I’m looking at XFX’s version of the HD 5850 card.
