The specs

If the RV770 GPU inside the Radeon 4850 and Radeon 4870 was ATI’s first TeraScale graphics engine (an obvious nod to the GPU’s distinction as the first desktop graphics card to break the 1 TeraFLOP mark), then RV870’s TeraScale 2 has to be twice as good right? Right. In fact, Radeon 5870 more than doubles the compute power of Radeon 4870 (1.2 TeraFLOPS), boasting up to 2.72 TeraFLOPS:

Radeon 5870 Specifications

TeraScale 2 Unified Processing Architecture

1600 Stream Processing Units

80 Texture Units

128 Z/Stencil ROP Units

32 Color ROP Units

GDDR5 interface with 153.6 GB/sec of memory bandwidth

PCI Express 2.1 x16 bus interface

DirectX 11 support

Shader Model 5.0

DirectCompute 11

Programmable hardware tessellation unit

Accelerated multi-threading

HDR texture compression

Order-independent transparency

OpenGL 3.2 support

Image quality enhancement technology

Up to 24x multi-sample and super-sample anti-aliasing modes

Adaptive anti-aliasing

16x angle independent anisotropic texture filtering

128-bit floating point HDR rendering

ATI Eyefinity multi-display technology

Three independent display controllers drive three displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls, and video overlays

Display grouping: Combine multiple displays to behave like a single large display

ATI Stream acceleration technology

OpenCL 1.0 compliant

DirectCompute 11

Double precision floating point processing support

Accelerated video encoding, transcoding, and upscaling

ATI CrossFireX™ multi-GPU technology

Dual, triple, and quad GPU scaling

Dual-channel bridge interconnect

ATI Avivo HD Video & Display technology

UVD 2 dedicated video playback accelerator

Advanced post-processing and scaling8

Dynamic contrast enhancement and color correction

Brighter whites processing (blue stretch)

Independent video gamma control

Dynamic video range control

Support for H.264, VC-1, and MPEG-2

Dual-stream 1080p playback support

DXVA 1.0 & 2.0 support

Integrated dual-link DVI output with HDCP (Max resolution: 2560x1600)

Integrated DisplayPort output (Max resolution: 2560x1600)

Integrated HDMI 1.3 output with Deep Color, xvYCC wide gamut support, and high bit-rate audio (Max resolution: 1920x1200)

Integrated VGA output (Max resolution: 2048x1536)

Integrated HD audio controller

Output protected high bit rate 7.1 channel surround sound over HDMI with no additional cables required

Supports AC-3, AAC, Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio formats


Speeds and feeds

Engine clock speed: 850 MHz

Processing power (single precision): 2.72 TeraFLOPS

Processing power (double precision): 544 GigaFLOPS

Polygon throughput: 850M polygons/sec

Data fetch rate (32-bit): 272 billion fetches/sec

Texel fill rate (bilinear filtered): 68 Gigatexels/sec

Pixel fill rate: 27.2 Gigapixels/sec

Anti-aliased pixel fill rate: 108.8 Gigasamples/sec

Memory clock speed: 1.2 GHz

Memory data rate: 4.8 Gbps

Memory bandwidth: 153.6 GB/sec

Maximum board power: 188 Watts

Idle board power: 27 Watts

2.15 billion transistors w/334mm2 die size
40-nm manufacturing process
256-bit GDDR5 memory interface
500 Watt or greater power supply with two 6-pin PCI Express® power connectors
recommended (600 Watt and four 6-pin connectors for ATI CrossFireX™ technology in
dual mode)

World’s first DX11 GPU

Besides the Radeon 5870’s 1600 stream processing units, a lot has been made about DirectX 11. Honestly DirectX 11 is more of an evolutionary extension of the concepts introduced in DirectX 10 more than anything else. It isn’t the ground up rewrite that DX10 was.

But it does bring with it a number of important new features such as new shader model 5.0 instructions designed to deliver simplified coding, better edge detection for anti-aliasing, and faster shadow filtering and ambient occlusion. DirectX 11 also offers support for multithreading: the DirectX driver, runtime, and game can all run in their own separate threads. But the most talked about additions are probably the new tessellation unit and compute shader.


ATI’s offered an integrated tessellation unit since the R600 GPU powering the Radeon 2900 XT, but the DX11 tesellation unit is more flexible than ATI’s. The compute shader is Microsoft’s answer to GPGPU solutions like OpenCL, CUDA, and ATI’s Stream computing initiative. The implications for gamers could be huge; the compute shader could potentially be used by game developers to bring GPU-based physics, ray-tracing, better AI, and more.


Microsoft has a ton of information on DirectX 11 which can be found here if you’d like to read up more on the subject. You can also check out ATI’s slides above. Honestly we would’ve liked to have had a dedicated DirectX 11 article up just prior to the arrival of DX11 hardware (similar to what we did with DirectX 10 a few years back), but obviously new CPUs from AMD and Intel launched earlier this month prevented that from happening.