The World's Fastest Graphics Card

The Sapphire Radeon HD 5970 carries the torch of the HD 5870, naming itself as the fastest graphics card ever.According to SlashGear, who saw it at CeBIT 2010, the card comes loaded with three cooling fans, 4GB of DDR3 memory running at 1,200MHz and an overclocked GPU at 850MHz, two dual-link DVI ports, and a Mini DisplayPort. All of this amounts to a massive 3DMark Vantage score of 22,000. Compare that with its predecessor's score of 17,000, or the GeForce GTX285's score of 12,000.Sapphire's motto when it comes to Radeon cards seems to be performance at a reasonable price point.
When AMD made the move from titanic clashes with Nvidia for framerate supremacy and instead towards better value for consumers' money, it was a bold but ultimately smart move. It turns out that the market does not support the foolish pursuit of minimal gains for high costs, ones that users will not support from their hard-earned cash. AMD conceded the uber framerates at the top end, instead focusing on top performance for lower prices, and it paid off handsomely with their 4800 series cards at the time.


Continuing that trend, AMD has released their 5800 series cards on 40nm processing, bringing evolutionary development and progress to the masses. But what is most interesting, however, is that AMD has achieved the rare trifecta: top performance, latest technological features, and value for the price. That, my friends, is a very compelling situation for consumers, regardless of how you slice it, no matter if you're an Nvidia or ATI disciple. We're bang-for-the-buck fanboys, and getting top performance for bottom dollar makes us drool.


In terms of technological advancements, the 5000 series cards bring DirectX 11 support to the table, along with a substantial increase in raw horsepower across the board. This is, in part, accomplished by GDDR5 memory continued from the previous generation, as well as shaders now coupled in pairs of shader compartments, so to speak, with 800 shaders each (1600 resulting). However, since we have two chips on one board by means of a Gen2 PLX bridge, we end up with 3200 Stream Processors delivering almost 5 TFLOPs of computing power. The diagram below illustrates (admittedly difficult to see the detail) the RV870 Cypress chip essentially doubling the power of the previous RV770 generation chip,