ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870
The ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 is a high-end DirectX 11 capable graphics card for laptops / notebooks by AMD. At the time of announcement (Jan 2010) the 5870 paired with GDDR5 memory should be the fastest laptop GPU (except SLI / CF) available. Technically, the chip is based on the desktop Radeon HD 5770 (RV840) with a slower clock rate.
The memory interface of the Mobility 5870 is composed out of two 64 bit wide controllers leading to a 128 bit memory bus that can access up to 1024 MB of DDR3 or GDDR5 memory (512 MB GDDR3). If (G)DDR3 is used by the laptop vendor the performance clearly suffers noticable.
The HD5870 offers 800 MADD cores (called Stream Processors) which are grouped in 160 5-dimensional groups. The cores support DirectX 11 functions in hardware (Tessellation, OIT, Post-Processing, Shadows, HDR Texture Compression). Furthermore, 16 ROPs, 40TMUs, and 40 TAUs can be found on the chip. All in all 1040 Mio transistors offer a theroretic computation power of up to 1.12 TFLOPS.
According to AMD, the HD 5000 series was also improved regarding general computing (as the HD4000 series was not optimized for this). Therefore, the performance of ATI stream, OpenCL, and DirectCompute 11 applications should be noticable better.
Compared to the previous generation (in this case the Mobility Radeon HD 4870), the HD5870 should be about 20% faster according to AMD. This is only valid for a GDDR5 version of the HD5870 (otherwise the memory bus would be the bottle neck). The gaming performance of the GPU should be sufficient for all current games (2009-2010) in high resolution and high detail settings. With 4x Antialiasing the following games should run fluently in 1920x1200: Left4Dead, UT3, Devil May Cry 4, Far Cry 2, ET:Quake Wars, and Wolfenstein MP (over 30 fps according to AMD slides - see beyond). Compared to the previous leader in the mobile segment, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280M, the new HD5870 should be faster. The performance evaluation slides by AMD can be found at the end of this page.
The Mobility Radeon HD 5000 series includes an improved video processor (UVD2) to decode HD videos with the graphic card. The new version is able to decode two HD streams simultaneously (e.g., for Blu-Ray picture in picture) if the graphic card offers enough memory bandwidth (only GDDR5 versions?). Since the Flash 10.1 Beta, the 5000 series is also able to help accelerate Flash HD videos (like YouTube).
A special feature of the HD 5000 series is its ability to transmit HD audio formats (like Dolby True HD or DTS HD Master Audio) with up to 8 channels and 192 kHz / 24 Bit over HDMI 1.3a.
As the desktop HD 5000 series, the Mobility HD 5870 also supports Eyefinity to connect up to 6 monitors to the graphics chip. Of course, this depends on how many monitor outputs the laptop vendor adds to the laptop (and how they are wired). Furthermore, it looks like only laptops with DisplayPort outputs support Eyefinity (up to now only one laptop, the Envy 17).
Due to the high power consumption of the Mobility Radeon HD 5870, it is only suited for large laptops with good (and possibly loud) cooling solutions. According to AMD, the performance per watt ratio (same power consumption, better performance) and the Idle power consumption were improved (thanks to Memory Clock Scaling and Clock Gating). Furthermore, the chip does support PowerXpress (with AMD chipset) and Switchable Graphics (Intel) to switch between the dedicated and chipset / CPU graphics card (with improved switching times).
Compared to desktop graphics cards, the Mobility Radeon HD 5870 should perform somewhere between a Radeon HD 5750 and 5770 according to the specs (shader count of 5770, clock rate of 5750).
| Manufacturer | ATI |
| Mobility Radeon HD 5800 Series | Mobility Radeon HD 5870 Crossfire 1600@700MHz Mobility Radeon HD 5870 800@700MHz Mobility Radeon HD 5850 800@625MHz Mobility Radeon HD 5830 800@500MHz |
| Codename | Broadway-XT |
| Pipelines | 800 - unified |
| Core Speed * | 700 MHz |
| Shader Speed * | 700 MHz |
| Memory Speed * | 1000 MHz |
| Memory Bus Width | 128 Bit |
| Memory Type | DDR3, GDDR3, GDDR5 |
| Max. Amount of Memory | 1024 MB |
| Shared Memory | no |
| DirectX | DirectX 11, Shader 5.0 |
| Current Consumption | 50 Watt |
| technology | 40 nm |
| Features | Eyefinity (up to 6 displays), HD Audio (Dolby True HD, DTS HD), HDMI 1.3a, Avivo HD (UVD2.2) |
| Notebook Size | large |
| Date of Announcement | 07.01.2010 |
| Information | 1.12 TFLOPS |
Benchmarks
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- Range of benchmark values for this graphics card
- Average benchmark values for this graphics cardGame Benchmarks
The following benchmarks stem from our benchmarks of review laptops. The performance depends on the used graphics memory, clock rate, processor, system settings, drivers, and operating systems. So the results don't have to be representative for all laptops with this GPU. For detailled information on the benchmark results, click on the fps number.
