Windows 7 DX11 Cards

Was the wait worth it? Will you be buying one?

  • Price is too high so no to Fermi..

    Votes: 2 16.7%
  • I bought a 5000 series and am happy..

    Votes: 5 41.7%
  • Both Fermi and 5000 series way too expensive

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • At last! Can't wait to get my Fermi.

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • I'm waiting until the price drops.

    Votes: 4 33.3%
  • I'm going to wait for the refresh and 512 cores

    Votes: 1 8.3%

  • Total voters
    12
Nvidia's website 'slips' GeForce GTX 580 listing


Can I get an "Ah, come on!" from AMD fanboys? No? Alright, leave that out but the truth is that the rumored but not announced GeForce GTX 580 has somehow found its way onto Nvidia.com, more specifically, on the 3D Vision System Requirements page.

The GeForce GTX 580 is said to powered by the 40nm GF110 GPU, have 512 CUDA Cores, 2GB of GDDR5 memory, and is supposed to be announced by the end of the year as a competitor to AMD's Cayman-based Radeon HD 6900 series cards. Expect Nvidia to pull the listing soon but the deed is done (maybe intentionally) - prepare for the GTX 580. I'll get the fire-resistant suits.

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Ref: Nvidia's website 'slips' GeForce GTX 580 listing | TechConnect Magazine
 
I'm playing the wait n see game with ATI I'd like a new 6xxx card but not if it's going to be twice what i paid for my 5770 I personally can't justify the need for nVidia's current crop of power hungry lava beasts when my 5770 does well enough at 1920x1080p

Just found out the price of the Gigabyte Radeon HD6870 1GB card $458.85nzd and about 30 bucks less for the HD6850
 
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AMD Radeon HD 6870 Video Card Review

Featuring a reconfigured Cypress GPU, the Barts architecture delivers AMD's HD3D technology with better performance and price.

The Radeon HD 6870 is AMD's latest DirectX-11 video card, and uses an updated Cypress back-end to offer 'Barts' GPU architecture. Built to deliver improved performance to the value-hungry mainstream gaming market, the $200 AMD Radeon HD 6850 and $250 Radeon HD 6870 video cards supplement their 5800-series counterparts. The most notable new feature is Bart's 3rd-generation Unified Video Decoder with added support for DisplayPort 1.2. AMD's UVD3 accelerates multimedia playback and transcoding, while introducing AMD HD3D stereoscopic technology with multi-view CODEC (MVC) support for playing 3D Blu-ray over HDMI 1.4a.

In this article Benchmark Reviews tests the AMD Radeon HD 6870 video card, a DirectX-11 graphics solution that doesn't really have direct competition at the $250 price point but costs less and still performs better than the Radeon HD 5850. Graphical frame rate performance is tested using the most demanding PC video game titles and benchmark software available. DirectX-10 favorites such as Crysis Warhead, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, and PCMark Vantage are all included, in addition to DX11 titles such as Aliens vs Predator, BattleForge, Lost Planet 2, Mafia II, Metro 2033, and the Unigine Heaven 2.1 benchmark

Review found here: AMD Radeon HD 6870 Barts Video Card | AMD,Radeon HD 6870,Barts GPU,Video Card,Benchmarks,Performance,Review,DirectX-11,AMD HD3D,AMD Radeon HD 6870 Barts DirectX-11 Video Card Benchmark Performance Review
 
AMD Radeon HD 6850 Video Card Review

NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 460 is threatened by AMD's Barts GPU with better performance and value.

The Radeon HD 6850 is AMD's latest DirectX-11 video card, and uses an updated Cypress back-end to offer 'Barts' GPU architecture. Built to deliver improved performance to the value-hungry mainstream gaming market, the $200 AMD Radeon HD 6850 and $250 Radeon HD 6870 video cards supplement their 5800-series counterparts. The most notable new feature is Bart's 3rd-generation Unified Video Decoder with added support for DisplayPort 2.1a. AMD's UVD3 accelerates multimedia playback and transcoding, while introducing AMD HD3D stereoscopic technology with multi-view CODEC (MVC) support for playing 3D Blu-ray over HDMI 1.4a.

In this article Benchmark Reviews tests the AMD Radeon HD 6850 video card, a DirectX-11 graphics solution that competes at the $200 price point with the 768MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 video card and the Radeon HD 5770 to a lesser extent. Graphical frame rate performance is tested using the most demanding PC video game titles and benchmark software available. DirectX-10 favorites such as Crysis Warhead, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, and PCMark Vantage are all included, in addition to DX11 titles such as Aliens vs Predator, BattleForge, Lost Planet 2, Mafia II, Metro 2033, and the Unigine Heaven 2.1 benchmark.

Review found here: AMD Radeon HD 6850 Barts Video Card | AMD,Radeon HD 6850,Barts GPU,Video Card,Benchmarks,Performance,Review,DirectX-11,AMD HD3D,AMD Radeon HD 6850 Barts DirectX-11 Video Card Benchmark Performance Review
 
AMD Radeon HD 6870 1GB Video Card

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Already we’ve taken the time to look at the entry level HD 6850. With that out the way it’s time to look at the HD 6870, a model that is again not designed to replace the HD 5870. It’s important that we continue to push this as I’m still reading on a lot of forums that people are under the impression the HD 6800 series is a flat out replacement for the HD 5800 series.

I don’t agree with what AMD has done with the name change, but really, this is the most confusing part. The HD 6900s that we should start to see next month aren’t going to be as confusing; they will be AMDs top of the line cards. What I would probably suggest if you’re interested in knowing a bit more about the lineup is head on over to our preview article posted in the middle of the week; AMD Radeon HD 6850 and HD 6870 – What We Can Tell You.
Of course, we’re not going to force you to do that and if you haven’t seen it you’ll no doubt want to check out the actual card we’re looking at today on the next page. What wasn’t in that original quick look were the clocks of the cards, so even if you have seen what the HD 6870 looks like, you might still want to check out the specifications to get a clearer picture.
Unlike the HD 6850 we just looked at, the HD 6870 isn’t a retail version, so we haven’t got a bundle to look at yet. Don’t worry, though, we’ve got retail versions in the lab and you’ll see what companies like Sapphire and HIS are offering when we start to look at CF and OC performance.
For now, though, let’s just check out that’s going on with this HD 6870 in reference form.

Review found here: AMD Radeon HD 6870 1GB Video Card Introduction :: TweakTown USA Edition
 
after reading the article above I now think it's better value to just purchase a second 5770 @ $298 and go CF than sell my 5770 and buy one 6850 for $428
 
It sounds like the best way to go as the new cards are still using the same size architecture as the 5 series (40nm). The next real big update will be when they jump to the 28nm node.
 
Is it the final design?

The guys from pcinlife.com have managed to score pictures of what appears to be a reference design of the upcoming Nvidia GTX 580 card. Although the specs are still quite blurry, we managed to find out that Nvidia did improve the original GF100 design, as we wrote earlier.

There have been some previous rumours regarding the performance of the upcoming GTX 580 and most popular one is that this one should end up to be 20 percent faster than the GTX 480. Judging by the looks of the cooler, Nvidia appears to have done a pretty good job in tweaking the GPU, thus increasing the performance per watt. The cooler has a dual-slot design, blower fan and rear exhaust grill, something that worked quite well for Nvidia on last few cards.

Bear in mind that we are still talking about a card that is in its development stage, and the pixellized cooler might not end up to be a final design. In any case, the card is just around the corner and should come before AMD's Cayman based cards. You can find the original post here: GTX 580

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772MHz 512 Shader part


We got a fewconfirmations of recently leaked specs and facts about Geforce GTX 580 posted Link Removed due to 404 Error.

The new card is sampling to journalists right now. It should launch on Tuesday 9th but it's unclear at what time. It looks like it will be the morning hours of Tuesday, November 9th.

A few important facts are that the card works at 772MHz core, has 512 shaders and 2200MHz memory. It should also be somewhat quieter than the previous GTX 480.

Our sources are also claiming that the mini shader cores got slightly improved and that the card works and performance just as it was intended for original Fermi GF100, Geforce GTX 480 card.

You can look at this card as Fermi done right and we can also confirm that the card is scheduled to launch before AMD's Cayman-based Radeon HD 6950 and HD 6970 parts.

The fun in the graphics world is just about to start, as there are still a few more interesting cards to launch until the end of 2010.

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Quieter

Nvidia's new Geforce GTX 580 is going to be cooler and a bit quieter than the Geforce GTX 480, a.k.a. original Fermi. From what we have managed to find out, the new card has similar TDP to Geforce GTX 480, but its cooler is redesigned and works more efficiently than the previous one.

Don’t get carried away, as the card will be hot, with a TDP of slightly under 250W. It has to be hot, but at least it will be heavy and fancy looking.

Naturally someone will develop a water block for this card as it simply makes sense to water cool it, as you can gain some more performance when overclocking this already hot card. Of course, the water cooler will come at a hefty price, as it always costs significantly more due to the small numbers of coolers that people buy for €500 cards.

Many people don’t go along with Geforce GTX 580 name as the card should end up with Geforce GTX 490 or similar, but as you know Nvidia ups the numbers every year, sometimes even by simply renaming products. Geforce 200 became Geforce 300 without any significant change, but the Geforce 400 series have deserved its name.

Geforce 500 cards are a tweak, a real kicker so you will be able to tell the difference, especially with GTX 560 parts that should bring a lot of performance in sub $ (€)200 market.

As for the rumous that this is a paper launch, we can definitely tell you that people have cards as we speak, the big names are testing them now and they should get available on the November 9th, after the official launch.

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Some Cayman Radeon HD6970 specs

1536 stream processors
We managed to get some specs of the soon-to-launch, well at least on paper, AMD Radeon HD 6970 card.

What we can share with you is that Cayman packs 1536 stream processors, 32ROPs, 96 Texture units and 2GB of GDDR5 memory.

We, the hard working people of Fudzilla, also have learned that the card comes with two DVI ports, 2 mini Display ports and HDMI, which is much better than what Nvidia's GTX 580 can offer.

TDP looks to be slightly lower than GTX 580’s but in worst case it looks to go up to the sky, something that we’ve seen with GTX 480 and almost 300W TDP in Furmark. Stay tuned, more specs will follow as soon as we can confirm them.

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Nvidia shows some GTX 580 details

New cooler detailed

During the PDX LAN event, Nvidia's Tom Petersen showed some details regarding Nvidia's upcoming GTX 580 card. Nvidia went and completely detailed the new vapor chamber cooler and the new Alien vs. Triangles tech demo, all on the new GTX 580.

The cooler is quite interesting this time as Nvidia decided to go for Vapor chamber cooling technology and made some quite bold claims regarding the noise output of the upcoming card. The cooler itself is pretty simple, at least if you had a chance to see one of the vapor chamber based coolers, as Sapphire did that a couple of times on its AMD based cards.
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According to the slides shown by Tom Petersen, the new GTX 580 is not only cooler and quieter than the GTX 480, it is even quieter than the not so quiet GTX 285. The new cooler should keep the new card well cooled and at around 47dBA in gaming scenario. This is a quite an impressive result considering that Nvidia didn't waste time to point out that this will be the fastest DirectX 11 card.

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The new tech demo is all about tesselation, something that Nvidia really wants to be seen. The new tech demo is rendered in real time with tesselation and made by Nvidia team. It will be quite interesting to see this tech demo on AMD's upcoming Cayman cards.

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Last but not least, Nvidia also showed the Call of Duty: Black Ops running on its GTX 580 card. Despite the fact that this is one of the upcoming games that a lot of gamers are quite keen to play, the most interesting fact is that it was run on the GTX 580 card and it looks like the new GPU gives a pretty smooth gameplay.

You can check out the full video below.



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So should Antilles

We got a fresh update on what happens after GTX 580 eventually launches. There should be a faster card, coming most likely in December 2010.

The new card is based on two GF100-derived cores, probably similar to the GF104, so we can only imagine the TDP of that card. Our educated guess for this time is at least 400W card, something that will get very hot indeed. It would appear that we are almost at the verge of a new era, where water cooling will be a must.

AMD also plans Antilles, Radeon HD 6970 dual Cayman card, and this one also looks to be quite a hot one. A GF100GX2 was on the roadmap for quite some time, but Nvidia never decided to release the card. We guess that chose to drop it because of its enormous TDP, courtesy of two GF100 chips.

So the launch is this year, which usually means December, but we know that super high end enthusiasts will wait to see who wins this round Radeon HD 6970 or Geforce GTX 5x0 GX2, before they make the buying decision.


 
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Last days of November

The latest info that we have received on Cayman is that there might be a launch this month. It appears to be delayed by a single week and that the company will make it for a late November launch.

We’ve been hearing November 22nd as the launch date and some other people have indicated mid of that week and now the date is November 29th, but again things tend to change far too often.

We are not sure on the quantities and availability but ATI might have more cards than the competition expected. We are not sure about the performance, early report was that the prototype was slower than GTX 580, but who knows, with a tweak or two as well as an increased clock and better drivers, Cayman might have a chance. In any case it will be a very close race.

The plan is to launch Radeon HD 6970 and HD 6950 together, while the X2 dual chip version aka Radeon HD 6990 comes later, most likely in early 2011.

Now let’s go after that final spec.

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HD 5550 turns HD 6390
Last month we got word that AMD might rebrand some if its entry level and mainstream HD 5000 series products in select markets.

Although AMD did not comment the reports, it appears that some cards will indeed be rebranded. According to Geeks3D, the HD 5550 has become the HD 6390, courtesy of a new BIOS.

In addition, AMD is expected to rebrand a couple more cards based on Redwood and Cedar cores, but we still don't know the specifics.

You can check out the photos here.

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Launch date in question
AMD's upcoming Cayman has been the source of much controversy in recent weeks due to a number of rumours and issues plaguing the launch.

Most partners did not get significant quantities in time and they expected the launch to be postponed by a week at best. AMD also did not deliver the final BIOS version as planned. In addition, rumours of yield issues also emerged and now there is another report painting a somewhat different light on the issues.

VR-Zone is reporting that the card was not delayed because of yield issues, but rather because of a shortage of DrMOS chips produced by Texas Instruments. AMD started using the chips on the HD 6800 series and they are in tight supply. However, it's worth noting that the shortage has not affected 6800 cards for some reason and let's hope it stays that way.

Interestingly, VR-Zone is now reporting that partners still don't know the new launch date and that the date should be set by the end of the week.

More here.

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Still before Christmas

We just got a nice little tip from one of our trusted sources that AMD just gave an official new date for Cayman launch, the 13th of December. This means that despite a brief delay, Cayman will still be on retail/e-tail shops before Christmas, and if the performance is right, will end up to be the fastest single GPU card this year.

The new date was given by AMD officially and probably sent to all partners and selected editors. It looks like the problem is quite real and partners mostly don't care about this delay as they have enough other cards to sell and as long as the card comes before Christmas. According to what we know, partners didn't recieve the final BIOS or the final driver for that matter, but that should hopefully change by the end of the month.

We are quite sure that we'll hear more about AMD's Cayman once it gets its final driver, as until then, the performance details are purely speculative and any early benchmark figures seen so far should be taken with a grain of salt, as proper drivers could squeeze out a bit more performance.

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Week 50 launch

AMD's PR has come up with a new PR statement in which they try to explain why they have delayed the Cayman card. Back at Los Angeles, at the Barts HD 6870 and 6850 presentation, they said that Cayman should launch in late November and now the new date is the week of December 13th aka week 50th.

Here is the official note and then we will translate it to real non-PR language. We only wish George Carlin was around to lend us a hand.

“Demand for the ATI Radeon HD 5800 series continues to be very strong, the ATI Radeon HD 5970 remains the fastest graphics card in the world and the newest members of the AMD graphics family, the AMD Radeon HD 6850 and HD 6870, have set new standards for performance at their respective price points, and are available in volume.

With that in mind, we are going to take a bit more time before shipping the AMD Radeon HD 6900 series. As of today, the NDA lift for information relating to the AMD Radeon HD 6950 and HD 6970 will be week 50. We will be providing additional information on these products, including the exact date and time of the NDA lift, in the weeks prior to launch." said Chris Hook and his crack spinner team.

This is how you should read it. Our dual-chip is still the fastest but we dropped it to below €400 to put more pressure on Nvidia, simply as Cayman might not be fast enough to beat the GTX 580, at least not the original spec.

We (AMD) now have three more weeks to try to get more performance and do some additional testing and hope that Cayman HD 6970 and 6950 will be enough to beat the GTX 580.

The card will barely make for Christmas but for most of people mid-December is too late for Xmas shopping. Let’s hope for AMD’s sake that the tweaked Cayman Radeon HD 6970 can beat the GTX 580, but considering the delays, this is becoming increasingly unlikely. We are giving Nvidia a three week advantage because we have to, not because we like to.

One more thing, component shortage is not the reason for the delay, we got that cleared out as Barts had the same issue, and still launched / shipped on time.

Antilles, Radeon HD 6990 dual card now slip into 2011 and it looks that Nvidia's dual-card comes in 2011 as well. We we're hoping to see both of them before the end of the year, but it appears that both the red and the green team had to change their plans.

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