Sapphire HD5850 1GB 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

Sapphire’s new card is based upon ATI’s newest chip, the RV870. This chip has 2.15 Billion transistors and is manufactured on a 40nm process. The die size of the chip is about 330mm2 in area. By way of comparison the RV770 used in the last ATI chip was 276mm2. ATI has more than doubled the transistor count from the HD 4870 to 2.15 Billion from 959 Billion on the HD 4890 but only increased the die size by 20%.

The HD 5850 has 1440 Stream Processors, which is down from the 1600 found on the HD 5870. ATI has basically doubled each component of the HD 4870 on the RV870, with 32 ROPs (Outputted Pixels), 80 Texture units and more. The card has a 725MHz core clock speed with a theoretical 52.2 Gigatexels fillrate per second theoretical. The memory interface that the HD5850 from Sapphire uses is GDDR5 with a 256-bit memory bus. The memory is clocked at 1GHz which translates into 4.0GHz effective compared to regular memory.

The main focus of the HD 5xxx series is support for DirectX 11. This new API brings features like Hull Shaders, Tesselation, support for DirectCompute and more to the graphics card space. ATI’s new cards are the first cards to fully support this new standard. The HD5850 also supports OpenGL 3.2 which is the latest OpenGL standard from the Khronos Group. The important thing to take away from the HD 5 series is that it supports the latest APIs.

One new exciting feature that the HD 5850 and 5870 supports is called Eyefinity. Eyefinity allows for up to 6 monitors to be used by a single HD 5850 or 5870 video card assuming the card has enough Display Port connectors to do so. The Sapphire HD5850 can connect three displays at the same time, and has a Display Port, a HDMI port, and two Dual-Link DVI-I ports. You can attach either two VGA, two HDMI, or two DVI-I monitors to go along with a DP monitor with adapters to enable three monitor gaming. RPGs, Flight Sims and FPS games all benefit from a wider field of view. Business people needing more screen space to look at stocks also can benefit.