XFX Radeon HD 5850 Video Card Review :: Speeds & Feeds

• Engine clock speed: 725 MHz
• Processing power (single precision): 2.09 TeraFLOPS
• Processing power (double precision): 418 GigaFLOPS
• Polygon throughput: 725M polygons/sec
• Data fetch rate (32-bit): 209 billion fetches/sec
• Texel fill rate (bilinear filtered): 52.2 Gigatexels/sec
• Pixel fill rate: 23.2 Gigapixels/sec
• Anti-aliased pixel fill rate: 92.8 Gigasamples/sec
• Memory clock speed: 1 GHz
• Memory data rate: 4.0 Gbps
• Memory bandwidth: 128 GB/sec
• Maximum board power: 151 Watts
• Idle board power: 27 Watts

The XFX HD 5850 is based upon ATI’s RV870 chip which is a 2.15 billion transistor chip, the largest graphics chip in terms of transistor size shipping today. The die size of the chip is 338mm2 which is much larger than the RV770 the chip replaces but much smaller than the GT200b chip NVIDIA currently uses on their GTX285.

The HD 5850 has 1440 Stream Processors as compared to the 1600 found on its bigger brother the HD 5870. The XFX card has a Core clock speed of 725MHz with a memory speed of 1GHz actual, 4GHz effective. With a 256-bit GDDR5 memory bus interface the card has 128GB of memory bandwidth. This compares to the 1.2GHz HD5870 with its 153.6GB/s of bandwidth.

The key new features of the HD 5xxx series includes: DirectX 11 compliance, OpenGL 3.2 support, Eyefinity support, ATI’s Stream acceleration technology and AVIVO 2. DirectX 11 includes support for Shader Model 5.0. Shader Model 5.0 introduces Hull Shaders and Compute Shaders to DirectX 11 to support Tessellation and DirectCompute.

DirectX 11 also brings Multithreading support to the graphics API pipeline, allowing for more efficient CPU utilization and GPU utilization in games. DirectX 11 also introduces new texture compression technology that supports High Dynamic Range lighting allowing for better compression while still keeping the high texture quality. Other features of DirectX 11 include 16k texture units, required 8-bit subtexel submip filtering precisions and lots more..

One of the problems with modern graphics cards is that they tend to have maxed out the resolution on monitors at 2560x1600 and performance of the latest generation is such that many times the idea of dual monitors isn’t enough. With the HD 5xxx series of cards ATI has moved on to a minimum of three monitor support with 6-monitor configurations possible on a single card via DisplayPort technology. This will allow for wider fields of view in games like Flight Sims and RPGs and enable business people who need a lot of screen real estate to look at more stocks.