Hardware ATI Radeon HD 5870 Architecture Analysis

Thanks Thehippoz

Isitari.

 

what the hell is 'brilinear'?

 

Two and a half times...

 

It's a hybrid between bilinear and trilinear filtering that was popularised by GeForceFX

 

I won't, it's decided, this card will follow in my 3870's footsteps.

 

Defo. not 'min-blowing'

 

Nice article. I was expecting more out of the 5870 but i suppose AMD/ATI cant make a great GPU every iteration (looked better on paper). briliner? serously thats a word? The power consumption is great though, 40nm = awesome.

 

Not sure I know any decent graphics Glossary article (might get Tim to write one!) but feel free to ask questions here - the forum peeps and the bit-tech staff are happy to help out!

 

Thanks for that Claave

To be fair it's nearly all on P7 & 8

I get the basics like the functions of the ROPs and tesselators but when I hit this

'The instruction works by passing the generic per-pixel weights from the set-up engine into the pixel shader before per-vertex attributes are pulled in as required. '

Most of that just goes over my head.

But the article done by CPC a while back on DX11 was great. Anything like that would be great .

 

fantastic article. really enjoyed reading it, this is what we want, more tech (aka geek) speak

 

Sorry, I geeked out a bit without really explaining myself there

Interpolation is used to create new data points, so it's about analysing the existing pixels and then pulling in vertex attributes (i.e. the orientation of the existing pixels/data) where required before the new points can be created. In the past, this was done in the graphics engine and it was a relatively blunt tool (it was effectively a fixed-function unit), but now it's done per-pixel in the shader units. This should be mean the results are more accurate and there'll be less of a bottleneck.

Hope that explains how Interpolation is being done on Cypress a bit better.

 

I cant figure out why people are disappointed at the 5870.

It's 2 times faster than the previous generation (4870) and consumes less power, runs cooler and has some awesome features built in. I'll eat my hat if the GTX380 is significantly faster than GTX280 SLI/GTX295 AND comes in at under £300....

 

I think it's because we've had a market full of X2 cards whereas the last generation they weren't as popular.

Then again, the HD4850 was 2X the HD3870X2.

 

I think Elton hits the nail on the head... the single GPU increases are hugely impressive, but it's not breaking into ground that we haven't seen before on a single graphics card because there are X2 cards out there from both AMD and Nvidia. I'm sure the 5870 X2 will be hugely impressive in that respect.

 

the 5870 delivers much better image quality though as the older x2 cards, it's a pity everyone's only looking at the FPS numbers.

 

Interestingly this is very true. Their AA and AF modes are phenomenal!

 

Yep, that was mentioned quite clearly in this article - the image quality is excellent but, like you say, a lot of people are only looking at the frame rate.

 

Actually this might be the reason I'll buy the HD5850 when the price lowers. Now the only problem being that I don't actually have the money. But AA + AF are necessities for me, especially in Oblivion.

 

Definitely agree on that front. Although the fps gains are welcome, after playing a few games the image quality seems to be the most noticeable improvement for me.

 

you have to remember to that those FPS that pretty much match all previous cards are using Beta drivers, when these mature, we will surely see a much better gain in FPS. Overall some points I think people still miss is a big one for me and thats power consumption and heat which is far less then any other card in its performance bracket which to be is simply awesome, about time we made things more efficient.