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<p><span style="font-size: small">Advanced Micro Devices has just announced their new generation of ATI Radeon HD graphics architectures. Our today’s article will show whether they will turn out as successful as their predecessors.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small"><a target="_blank" href="http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/radeon-hd6870-hd6850.html">Read more...</a></span></p>
While we are about to welcome the sixth generation of AMD Radeon graphics products, let’s look at the full Radeon HD 5xxx series graphics cards in the latest tests using newest drivers.
<p><span style="font-size: small;"> All things considered, the Radeon HD 5000 series has gone very well for AMD. When they launched it just over a year ago, they beat NVIDIA to the punch by nearly 6 months and enjoyed a solid term as the kings of the GPU world, with halo parts like the 5870 and 5970 giving them renewed exposure at the high-end of the market while mainstream products like the 5670 redefining the HTPC. Ultimately all good things come to an end though, and as NVIDIA has launched the GeForce 400 series AMD has needed to give up the single-GPU halo and lower prices in order to remain competitive.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small;"> But if spring is a period of renewal for NVIDIA, then it’s fall that’s AMD’s chance for renewal. Long before Cypress and the 5000 series even launched, AMD’s engineers had been hard at work at what would follow Cypress. Now a year after Cypress we get to meet the first GPU of the next Radeon family: Barts. With it comes the Radeon HD 6800 series, the culmination of what AMD has learned since designing and launching the 5800 series. AMD may not have a new process to produce chips on this year, but as we’ll see they definitely haven’t run out of ideas or ways to improve their efficiency on the 40nm process.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small;"><a target="_blank" href="http://www.anandtech.com/show/3987/amds-radeon-6870-6850-renewing-competition-in-the-midrange-market">Read more...</a><br />
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<p><span style="font-size: small;">Despite its budget status, Nvidia GeForce GTS 450 supports SLI technology fully. Once we got our hands on the second GF106 based graphics card, we decided to check out its performance in a tandem with another GeForce GTS 450.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: small;"><a target="_blank" href="http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/geforce-gts450-sli.html">Read more...</a><br />
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New GeForce GTX 460 models keep appearing in the market. Today we are going to tell you about another interesting modification of the "people’s favorite" Nvidia based solution. This time the new graphics card comes from Asustek Computer.
Nvidia continues the counter attack in the DirectX11-compatible segment. Following the mainstream but pretty high-performance GeForce GTX 460, the company released their budget GeForce GTS 450, which will be the main hero of our today’s review. Moreover, we will also talk about the features, functionality and performance of one of the first products built on this GPU – Zotac GeForce GTS 450 AMP!.
Back in July NVIDIA launched Fermi in to the professional space, introducing the first of their Fermi-based Quadro cards. The Quadro 4000, 5000, and 6000 were all based on GF100, and like the GeForce and Tesla lines used cut down GPUs in order to meet NVIDIA’s TDP and yield needs.
Notably, all the Quadros launched with their FP64 capabilities uncapped, something we weren’t sure would be made available outside of the Tesla line. Along those same lines, the 5000 and 6000 models also had ECC support enabled, again another feature initially promoted for Tesla. The result of this was that the first Fermi Quadro cards were capable of behaving a great deal like Tesla cards on top of their traditional professional graphics duties.
Now less than 3 months down the line NVIDIA is launching the rest of the Quadro series. Today marks the launch of the 2000 and the 600, which extend the Fermi Quadro lineup to the smaller Fermi GPUs. In the process, these cards also move away from Tesla-like compute capabilities and focuses more on Quadro’s traditional graphics roles such as modeling, CAD, digital video production, and the more recently emerging field of GPU-accelerated professional applications.
Wrapping up our two part series about NVIDIA’s new GeForce GTS 450, we have our in-depth look in to the vendor cards. As was the case with the GTX 460, NVIDIA’s partners are coming out swinging by offering a wide variety of customized cards alongside NVIDIA’s reference design. Custom PCBs, coolers, and more; you’ll find it all here.
One thing that is significantly different from the launch of the GTX 460 however is just how far NVIDIA’s partners are overclocking their cards. With the GTX 460 the vendor cards we saw came with a mild overclock. But with the GTS 450 launch the cards are coming with much greater overclocks. Case in point: EVGA launched with a SuperClock (tier 1 overclock) card for the GTX 460 launch – for the GTS 450 launch they’re going with a FTW (tier 3 overclock) card.
As a result there’s a distinctly wider gap between the custom vendor cards and NVIDIA’s reference cards, a beneficial outcome for the vendors as it makes it easier for them to separate and justify their higher-priced higher-margin cards from the army of reference clones. In the case of the GTS 450 these overclocks are especially beneficial as the GTS 450 at reference clockspeeds is a bit of a lame duck: it’s only as cheap as a Radeon HD 5770, but it consistently underperforms that card. With overclocks pushing 20%, NVIDIA’s partners can close the gap left by the reference-clocked GTS 450.
We’ll be looking at 4 cards today, covering the spectrum from reference-based with a strong overclock to a triple-slot monster. 3 of our 4 cards have similar overclocks, coming in at roughly 920MHz for the core and 1GHz (4GHz effective) for the memory. This means the resulting performance for most of these cards is virtually identical, but how each one gets there is slightly different.
After the drawn out launch of GF100 and the GTX 400 series earlier this year, NVIDIA has been firing on all cylinders when it comes to the launch of the rest of the Fermi family. In July we saw the launch of the GF104 GPU and the GTX 460 it powers, providing a surprising tweak to the Fermi architecture on what should have been a simple waterfall part, and in the process trampling AMD’s Radeon HD 5830 at the $200 price point. For the first time in over a year we saw an NVIDIA product come out that was hyper-competitive on performance and pricing, the kind of competition we sorely miss.
Now 2 months after that launch we’re going to find out if lightning strikes twice. Today NVIDIA is launching the next desktop video card in the 400 series: GTS 450 Powering it is their new Fermi family GPU – GF106 – the next in the line of successively smaller Fermi GPUs for cheaper products. Targeted directly against AMD’s Radeon HD 5700 series, does it have what it takes to dethrone AMD's mainstream lineup ?
The majority of powerful graphics accelerators are exact replicas of the reference Nvidia and AMD products, but even here we can sometimes come across very interesting solutions that deserve a closer look. Our today’s article will talk about one graphics card like that.