Introduction

ATI recently jumped ahead of their closest rivals nVidia by releasing their latest generation of GPUs upon the market, just before the launch of Windows 7 in an attempt to cash in on the early adopters of Direct X 11. However, like always the first run of cards made available were mind blowingly expensive, so what's a mid-ranger looking for an upgrade to do? Fortunately it wasn't long before the slightly more mid-range options were made available, the 57xx series.

For those with an aging 7 or 8 series card from nVidia - or a 3 or mid level 4 series from ATI - still powering your gaming rig, this could well be the card that you upgrade to. Is it worth it though? Let's find out.

Features

• 1.04 billion 40nm transistors
• TeraScale 2 Unified Processing Architecture
  • 800 Stream Processing Units
  • 40 Texture Units
  • 64 Z/Stencil ROP Units
  • 16 Color ROP Units
• GDDR5 memory interface
• PCI Express 2.1 x16 bus interface
• DirectX® 11 support
  • Shader Model 5.0
  • DirectCompute 11
  • Programmable hardware tessellation unit
  • Accelerated multi-threading
  • HDR texture compression
  • Order-independent transparency
• OpenGL 3.2 support1
• 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 technology2,3
  • 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
  • Accelerated video encoding, transcoding, and upscaling4,5
    • Native support for common video encoding instructions
• ATI CrossFireX™ multi-GPU technology6
  • Dual GPU scaling
• ATI Avivo HD Video & Display technology7
  • UVD 2 dedicated video playback accelerator
  • Advanced post-processing and scaling8
  • 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 support9,10
  • DXVA 1.0 & 2.0 support
  • Integrated dual-link DVI output with HDCP11
    • Max resolution: 2560x160012
  • Integrated DisplayPort output
    • Max resolution: 2560x160012
  • Integrated HDMI 1.3 output with Deep Color, xvYCC wide gamut support, and high bit-rate audio
    • Max resolution: 1920x120012
  • Integrated VGA output
    • Max resolution: 2048x153612
  • 3D stereoscopic display/glasses support13
  • 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 technology7
  • 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

Specifications

• Engine clock speed: 850 MHz
• Processing power (single precision): 1.36 TeraFLOPS
• Polygon throughput: 850M polygons/sec
• Data fetch rate (32-bit): 136 billion fetches/sec
• Texel fill rate (bilinear filtered): 34 Gigatexels/sec
• Pixel fill rate: 13.6 Gigapixels/sec
• Anti-aliased pixel fill rate: 54.4 Gigasamples/sec
• Memory clock speed: 1.2 GHz
• Memory data rate: 4.8 Gbps
• Memory bandwidth: 76.8 GB/sec
• Maximum board power: 108 Watts
• Idle board power: 18 Watts