ATI RADEON HD 5850 1024MB

The recently released Radeon HD 5870 and 5850 products are segmented in the high-end range and as such do come with a fairly spicy price tag making all the new features out of reach for a lot of people. ATI is going to address that with the releases of series 5700 graphics cards. Two products will be releases in the mid-range segment. However, they will be stacked and loaded with exactly the same features as the 5800 series, yet it's performance is cut-down and obviously in return, the pricing is much more attractive as well.

In collaboration with ATI we will test the Radeon HD 5750 in single and a CrossfireX (Multi-GPU) setup. It's a product that performance wise positions itself close to the Radeon HD 4850 and GeForce GTS 250 yet now with superior features at an attractive price.

So what's the buzz for series 5000? Well, ATI has been focusing on three primary features and key selling points for the series 5000 products. First off, the new graphics adapters are of course DirectX 11 ready. With Windows 7 and Vista being DX11 ready all we need are some games to take advantage of DirectCompute, multi-threading, Hardware Tessellation and new shader 5.0 extensions. DX11 is going to be good. More on that later on in this article of course.

Another big feature of the product that you already learned about is of course Eyefinity, the ability to connect one to up-to six monitors (depending on AIC/AIB choices in outputs) to your videocard and use it in a desktop environment, or to create an incredible wide monitor resolution to play games in. It's nice, it is niche and yes... certainly not an option many of you will use... but really it is breathtaking as well. We'll explain this in a separate chapter.

The third big and prominent feature is of course performance for money. It's new, it's affordable, it has AMD written all over it ... head on over to the next page where we'll meet and greet Juniper aka Radeon HD series 5700.