Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 1GB Video Card Review

Feature Summary
Here is a summary of features of the Radeon HD 5850 from AMD’s site:

• 2.15 billion 40nm transistors
• TeraScale 2 Unified Processing Architecture
  • 1440 Stream Processing Units
  • 72 Texture Units
  • 128 Z/Stencil ROP Units
  • 32 Color ROP Units
• GDDR5 interface with 128.0 GB/sec of memory bandwidth
• PCI Express 2.1 x16 bus interface
• DirectX® 11 support
  • Shader Model 5.0
  • DirectCompute 11
  • Programmable hardware tessellation unitAccelerated 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 scaling
  • 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: 2560×1600
  • Integrated DisplayPort output
    • Max resolution: 2560×1600
  • Integrated HDMI 1.3 output with Deep Color, xvYCC wide gamut support and high bit-rate audio
    • Max resolution: 1920×1200
  • Integrated VGA output
    • Max resolution: 2048×1536
  • 3D stereoscopic display/glasses support
  • 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
• ATI PowerPlay™ power management technology
  • Dynamic power management with low power idle state
  • Ultra-low power state support for multi-GPU configurations
• Certified drivers for Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP

Speeds & Feeds

• Engine clock speed: 725 MHz
• Processing power (single precision): 2.09 TeraFLOPS
• Processing power (double precision): 418 GigaFLOPS
• Polygon throughput: 725M polygons/sec
• Data fetch rate (32-bit): 209 billion fetches/sec
• Texel fill rate (bilinear filtered): 52.2 Gigatexels/sec
• Pixel fill rate: 23.2 Gigapixels/sec
• Anti-aliased pixel fill rate: 92.8 Gigasamples/sec
• Memory clock speed: 1 GHz
• Memory data rate: 4.0 Gbps
• Memory bandwidth: 128 GB/sec
• Maximum board power: 151 Watts
• Idle board power: 27 Watts