Category Archives: Sapphire

Sapphire Radeon HD 5770 Video Card

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model0042Last week AMD launched their first mainstream Radeon HD 5000 series graphics cards designed to deliver DirectX 11 support to the masses. The Radeon HD 5770 is an impressive product providing gamers with excellent performance in the latest and greatest games. Still, as good as one Radeon HD 5770 graphics card is, we wanted to know what two could offer when using Crossfire technology…

Right now is an interesting time to purchase a new graphics card, as we are faced with a rare scenario that has seen AMD beat Nvidia to the punch with their latest generation products. Up until a month ago the GeForce GTX 285 featured the worlds most powerful and complex GPU based on the GT200 architecture. With a price tag near enough to $400 US, it goes without saying that not everyone enjoyed the power of this particular graphics card.

However when AMD released the Radeon HD 5870 on September 23rd at $380 US, it was able to make the GeForce GTX 285 look quite slow. Then the Radeon HD 5850 followed a week later, and despite a price tag of just $280 US, it was still faster than the GeForce GTX 285, making it the second fastest GPU available.

Despite all this, what was to follow excited most gamers the most, as we introduced the new Radeon HD 5770 last week. This particular version may be slower than both the Radeon HD 5870 and 5850, but it is also a great deal cheaper as well, with the retail value of just $160 US. The Radeon HD 5770 turned out to deliver similar performance to that of the Radeon HD 4870, which is obviously the product it is stepping in for.

This also made the Radeon HD 5770 only slightly slower than the GeForce GTX 260 in most tests, while there were a few that saw it come out on top. The similar performance margins between the Radeon HD 5770 and the older Radeon HD 4870 quickly got us wondering about Crossfire performance. Should you throw a pair of these graphics cards together you could theoretically achieve Radeon HD 4870 X2 like performance for $320 US.

That said, before spending $320 US on a pair of Radeon HD 5770 graphics cards, what are the alternatives right now? The GeForce GTX 275 seems to be fetching between $280 – $300 US, so it is only slightly cheaper, while the GeForce GTX 285 is still priced around $380 US. There is also the Radeon HD 5870 at $380 US, while the most expensive graphics card money can buy is the GeForce GTX 295 at around $480 US.

Therefore the main competition for a Radeon HD 5770 Crossfire configuration will come from the Radeon HD 5870 and the GeForce GTX 285. While we will be comparing the Radeon HD 5770 Crossfire configuration to 10 other graphics cards, including a single Radeon HD 5770, we will be focusing primarily on how it compares to the Radeon HD 5870 and GeForce GTX 285 graphics cards. In total we have tested with 18 games, while we have also included some 3Dmark results, so get ready for an onslaught.

Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 2G

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Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 2G

Innovative video cards only come along every once in a while. When ATI launched the HD 4870 last year, they took the lead in the price/performance category of video cards. Their HD 4870 had a less expensive stablemate in the form of the Radeon HD 4850. This had the same specifications in terms of SPs, ROPs and other specs but was clocked slightly lower and used GDDR3 memory instead of GDDR5 on the HD 4870.

Late last year ATI released the Radeon HD 4870 x2 to compete with the GeForce GTX280 cards from NVIDIA. This combined two HD 4870s on a single PCB, improving performance versus a single chipped card. Board manufacturers like Sapphire have gone a different route. The HD 4850 was a great card for its price why not combines two of them on a single card like the HD 4870 x2 using the HD 4850 chip? Sapphire is a manufacturer of ATI based video cards and today’s review is on the HD 4850 x2 video card from them.

  • 2x 956 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
  • PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
  • 2×256-bit GDDR3 memory interface memory interface
  • Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 support
  • Shader Model 4.1
  • 32-bit floating point texture filtering
  • Indexed cube map arrays
  • Independent blend modes per render target
  • Pixel coverage sample masking
  • Read/write multi-sample surfaces with shaders
  • Gather4 texture fetching
  • Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
  • 2×800 stream processing units
  • Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
  • Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
  • Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
  • 128-bit floating point precision for all operations
  • Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
  • Shader instruction and constant caches
  • Up to 160 texture fetches per clock cycle
  • Up to 128 textures per pixel
  • Fully associative multi-level texture cache design
  • DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
  • High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
  • Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs
  • Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
  • Re-Z, and Z Range optimization
  • Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)
  • Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)
  • Up to 8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing
  • Accelerated physics processing
  • Dynamic Geometry Acceleration
  • High performance vertex cache
  • Programmable tessellation unit
  • Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
  • Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance
  • Anti-aliasing features
  • Multi-sample anti-aliasing (2, 4, or 8 samples per pixel)
  • Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality
  • Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
  • Gamma correct
  • Super AA (ATI CrossFireX™ configurations only)
  • All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering
  • Texture filtering features
  • 2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)
  • 128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
  • sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
  • Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
  • Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support
  • Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support
  • OpenGL 3.1 support
  • ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform6
  • Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD 2) for H.264/AVC, VC-1, and MPEG-2 video formats
  • High definition (HD) playback of Blu-ray and HD DVD video
  • Dual stream (HD+SD) playback support
  • DirectX Video Acceleration 1.0 & 2.0 support
  • Support for BD-Live certified applications
  • Hardware DivX and MPEG-1 video decode acceleration
  • Accelerated video transcoding & encoding for H.264 and MPEG-2 formats
  • ATI Avivo Video Post Processor6
  • Color space conversion
  • Chroma subsampling format conversion
  • Horizontal and vertical scaling
  • Gamma correction
  • Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
  • De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
  • Detail enhancement
  • Color vibrance and flesh tone correction
  • Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
  • Bad edit correction
  • Enhanced DVD upscaling (SD to HD)
  • Automatic dynamic contrast adjustment
  • Two independent display controllers
  • Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays for each display
  • Full 30-bit display processing
  • Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion
  • Spatial/temporal dithering provides 30-bit color quality on 24-bit and 18-bit displays
  • High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all display outputs
  • Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
  • Fast, glitch-free mode switching
  • Hardware cursor
  • Two integrated dual-link DVI display outputs
  • Each supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920×1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560×1600 (dual-link DVI)2

    • o Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content3

  • Two integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
  • Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048×15362
  • DisplayPort output support
  • 24- and 30-bit displays at all resolutions up to 2560×16002
  • HDMI output support
  • All display resolutions up to 1920×10802
  • Integrated HD audio controller with support for stereo and multi-channel (up to 7.1) audio formats, including AC-3, AAC, DTS, DTS-HD & Dolby True-HD4, enabling a plug-and-play audio solution over HDMI
  • Integrated AMD Xilleon™ HDTV encoder
  • Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S-video/composite)
  • Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
  • Underscan and overscan compensation
  • Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
  • VGA mode support on all display outputs
  • ATI PowerPlay™ Technology5
  • Advanced power management technology for optimal performance and power savings
  • Performance-on-Demand
  • Constantly monitors GPU activity, dynamically adjusting clocks and voltage based on user scenario
  • Clock and memory speed throttling
  • Voltage switching
  • Dynamic clock gating
  • Central thermal management – on-chip sensor monitors GPU temperature and triggers thermal actions as required
  • ATI CrossFireX™ Multi-GPU Technology
  • Scale up rendering performance and image quality with two, three, or four GPUs
  • Integrated compositing engine
  • High performance dual channel bridge interconnect1