14 DAY TRIAL // Sunnyvale, California-based Advanced Micro Devices is currently the only graphics chip maker that can provide users with hardware support for Microsoft's DirectX 11 API and compatible gaming titles.
This is available through the company's line of Radeon HD 5xxx series of graphics cards, featuring the latest 40nm manufacturing technology. Currently, this series includes the HD 5970, HD 5800 and HD 5700 families of GPUs. However, the company is expected to roll out a new family of GPUs, oriented at the entry-level market.
The Radeon HD 5670 is based on the Redwood XT graphics processing engine and will be targeted at the low-end and entry-level market segments. Apparently, the fellows over at Sapphire Technology, one of the ATI Radeon board partners, have decided to announce the launch of the new product, before all of the other partners. A press release from the company, which has just surfaced on this website, indicates that Sapphire will provide its customers with several designs, based on the same GPU.
According to the aforementioned source, the top two models of the Sapphire HD 5670 will provide users with a choice for 1GB or 512MB of GDDR5 memory, featuring clock speed of 775MHz and 1000MHz (4GHz effective) for the core and memory, respectively. In addition, these two will be featured with a custom cooler from Artic Cooling and offer Dual-Link DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort connectivity. Two other models will provide the same choices for the memory, but will only be featured with DVI, HDMI and VGA connectivity.
As you can expect, the card will deliver entry-level users hardware support for DirectX 11 games, but also for ATI's own technologies, including ATI Stream and ATI Eyefinity. Unfortunately, there's no word on the pricing details of the new cards, but we expect them to be the most affordable DirectX 11-ready cards on the market.