14 DAY TRIAL // One week ago, Sunnyvale, California-based Advanced Micro Devices announced the official debut of its new generation of Radeon graphics cards, the much-anticipated Radeon HD 5800-series GPUs. The launch included details on both the company's high-end Radeon HD 5870 and Radeon HD 5850, but early benchmarks only delivered details on the company's new flagship card, the Radeon HD 5870. According to various reports on the Internet, the HD 5850 was hard to find and only a handful of benchmark and review sites were able to grab one and put it through its paces. However, it looks like the situation has changed and the chip maker has finally rolled out the new card.
As a quick reminder, the Radeon HD 5850 is pretty much the same as the new flagship Radeon card, especially since it is based on a cut-down version of the same Cypress core that has been enabled on AMD's Radeon HD 5870. The card runs at a factory-set core frequency of 725MHz, compared to 850MHz on the HD 5870, while the GDDR5 memory runs at 1GHz, compared to 1.2GHz. There are only 1440 stream processors enabled on the card and just 72 Texture units with 32 ROPs. The memory bus is still set at 256-bit and the card comes with the same number of transistors, namely 2.15 billion. Based on the same 40nm TSMC manufacturing process, the new card runs cooler and is smaller than AMD's newest graphics monster.
The benefits of the Radeon HD 5850 are that the new card is more affordable, at an expected price tag of approximately US$259, while providing the same support for DirectX 11, Eyefinity, angle-independent anisotropic filtering, HDMI bitstreaming, and supersample anti-aliasing. In addition, the TDP is specified at 151W, while the physical dimensions of the card allow it to be installed in a wide range of computer systems.
As far as performance goes, there's a general belief that the new card is currently the best alternative for NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 285, providing a performance similar if not beyond the aforementioned card. A number of tech sites have already published their findings on benchmarking the new Radeon card, so be sure to check out the following links: Anandtech, Tom's Hardware, Guru3D, HardOCP.