AMD Radeon HD 5770 Pictures And Benchmarks

AMD's new mainstream card, codenamed "Juniper", is unveiled sooner than expected, brings 800 SPs.



These are the architectural details, slight less than the rumored 1120SPs that I mentioned on the Radeon HD 5870 article, a figure given in the Anandtech review of the card. Contrary to the 4770, the cards are already pushing GDDR5 to great hights, so it will be harder to compensate on bandwidth by overclocking.



The new die(right) is not half the size of the old, it's estimated to be 180mm² whereas "Cypress" measures 334mm². The picture above isn't exactly on the same scale, as the chip's package is also smaller.



The Radeon HD 5770 brings the same 800SPs that were featured from the Radeon HD 4850, 4870 and 4890, but on a considerably narrower memory bandwidth than the latter two. The price point is slightly high when compared with AMD's current offerings. The Radeon HD 4870 features 50% more bandwidth and the Radeon HD 4890 has 62% more and the shader performance is the same compared with the latter. The new card has some architectural improvements, so it's hard to have an overall figure of performance based on specifications. There is one benchmark available currently:


The performance is only 18% lower than the Radeon 4890 but 3DMark Vantage has shown a better performance scaling for the 5870, almost double of the 4890, that hasn't been the rule throughout game benchmarks.
Overall, the card looks in great shape and there really isn't a better offer from Nvidia, ATI is competing against itself. Given that DX11 support took up some die space, the price point has to be a little higher even if performance isn't remarkable compared with the previous generation price point and performance.
You can get an XFX Radeon HD 4870 with 1GiB for $145, which will deliver better performance in bandwidth depend scenarios. It will depend on how frequently will you switch hardware and if you want to enjoy DX 11 when games are out, or rather wait for a while. On this price range, the only interesting price comparison with older 4800 cards is the one with 1GiB cards, as you can enjoy a better minimum framerates versus 512MiB cards - sometimes by as much as 2 times.
Eyefinity is also present on these cards.



Even cut down to only 720 shaders, the Radeon HD 5750 may well be the more interesting card. Bandwidth is only 4% down rom the 5770 and the core can surely be overclocked.
It's a more balanced card, with the 1GiB version still very well priced at $129. This certainly is looking like it will be my choice among mainstream cards, as cut down cards usually have much lower memory bandwidth that simply kill performance - that has turned this time.




Expect official reviews on the next Tuesday morning.

Source: MyMyPC (article was pulled due to NDA violation)

DVI, HDMI Adapters And Audio

Motherboards and graphics cards can come with no DVI->HDMI adapter and no HDMI output but still claim that they can do HDMI audio. Some people wonder if this works, but it does indeed.

The test subject:


This motherboard has no HDMI and no adapter, just the DVI. The audio codec for HDMI is embedded and it brings drivers for Windows and Linux support exists from Linux 2.6.30 kernel at least. Linux was hardware to get to work but it was possible with some minor adjustments. The embedded codec on the GeForce 8100 used here is Intel HDA compatible.

As long as motherboards and graphics cards claim support for HDMI audio you will be OK because the audio data is sent embedded in the same TMDS data channels that carry video. DVI looks like this:


We only care for DVI-D and DVI-I, which are the ones that bring the digital data channels. I have also never seen a living DVI-A and DVI-I is the most common type.
The HDMI adapter just routes the TMDS data channels - contaning both audio and video on enabled devices - to the equivalent pins and everything works transparently like if it was natively an HDMI port. There is no funky business here, it all simply works, since they are electrically compatible.
The situation is much different with DisplayPort, which needs active adapters to work with either DVI or HDMI.

Weekly Memory Price Update

Memory prices are up slightly since last week, still moving up but now not as sharply. DDR2 moved closer to DDR3, up 3% since last week, while DDR3 raised 2%.
The recommendation stands as previously: if you need to buy memory on the short term, do it ASAP.

Nvidia PhysX Hacked To Support Rendering With ATI Cards

A patch is all you need.

Last week, Nvidia started pulling off the recently introduced support for PhysX on Nvidia cards and graphics rendering on AMD Radeon cards - which became possible with Windows 7 - with the latest driver update. This week the software check was hacked by someone obviously bothered with the decision and both vendors can now happily coexist in the same PC.

The steps to get PhysX working again are easy:

• Download the patch - x86 - 64bits
  
• Install Nvidia's driver and don't reboot
  
• Install the patch
  
• Reboot and it will working again.

Nvidia will probably soon take action against the said hacker and site hosting the patches, so get them while they're hot. It will be interesting to follow future updates to find out how determined they are to keep PhysX support all for themselves.

Nvidia Shows Off Fake Fermi

Remember when I mentioned that Fermi being a shorter card would be totally feasible? It surely can be smaller than the desktop cards but the picture above is one of a dummy card.

See the PCI-e 6pins connector without any pins on the PCB? That was one indication but the card has plenty more problems like that one. The whole situation got so out of hand that an Nvidia Vice President admitted that the card was indeed a dummy. The real card? It's full of wires and module boards, not pretty things, but one I should still rather see.
What surprises me is that they wanted to generate hype but still allowed people to take close up pictures, therefore exposing the bluff. Epic. Fail.

Intel Experiments With Processor Self Tuning

Intel has a prototype processor that aims at being more energy efficient in all product ranges, from mobile to server markets. The new processor performs tuning based on various parameters, including clockspeed, temperature and voltage.




By using some of die space, Intel's engineers are able to do way with some of the methods used today in processor binning. Intel will still choose the best silicon for more expensive processors but it can now do so without that incurring a power and frequency penalty due to the safety margins required. The processor will also automatically adjust itself when the user provides better cooling to the system, readjusting itself as needed when temperatures get warmer during the summer, without any need of user intervention. It's the next level of Intel's turbo mode, and then some.
Very exciting stuff, which is not expected to debut soon. It's a similar experiment to the Terascale 80 core processor from a few years ago.