Sapphire Announces Radeon HD 5970 and HD 5970 OC Edition Graphics Cards

World leading graphics supplier, SAPPHIRE Technology, now introduces the world’s fastest graphics card, the SAPPHIRE HD 5970 OC Edition. With twice the computing power of the highly acclaimed SAPPHIRE HD 5870, the new HD 5970 model shares all the exciting features of this family – including support for the DirectCompute 11 instruction set of Microsoft DirectX 11, hardware tessellation and multi threaded communication with the system CPU. It also supports the acceleration of applications supported by ATI Stream, and the ability to display across three monitors simultaneously with ATI Eyefinity.

The SAPPHIRE HD 5970 OC Edition ships with enhanced clock speeds of 735MHz core and 1010MHz (4.04GHz effective) – faster than the standard model, making the SAPPHIRE HD 5970 OC the fastest card in its class, and the fastest in the world*. Enthusiasts will also be able to tune performance of these SAPPHIRE cards using the SAPPHIRE Redline voltage tweaker tool** to enable higher levels of overclocking.

With 2GB of fifth generation GDDR5 memory and a new architecture with a total of 3200 stream processors and 160 texture units the SAPPHIRE HD 5970 OC is lightning fast with existing DirectX10.1, DirectX 10 and DirectX 9.0 games and applications, and will support stunning new levels of detail, transparency and lighting effects in new releases of software using DirectX 11. All of this comes with a modest active power consumption and ATI Powerplay Dynamic Power Management to achieve super-low power consumption in 2D and idle modes.

These cards incorporate the latest architectural features from the ATI division of AMD in order to fully support Microsoft DirectX 11, including DirectCompute 11 instructions, hardware Tessellation and multi-threaded communications with the system CPU. These combine to provide new capabilities such as the interaction between transparent objects, new lighting and accelerated post processing effects as well as supporting ATI Stream for accelerating applications such as video transcoding.

ATI Eyefinity
In addition to spectacular image clarity, speed and visual effects, the SAPPHIRE HD 5000 series supports a new multi-monitor mode known as Eyefinity. This allows a single graphics card to display images over an array of several monitors. Each card supports up to three monitors, with an overall resolution of up to 7680 x 1600. This opens up exciting possibilities not just for multi-screen gaming, but also for information systems, multimedia systems and promotional displays.

Video performance
All of the SAPPHIRE HD 5000 series cards have an on board hardware UVD (Unified Video decoder) considerably reducing CPU load and delivering smooth decoding of Blu-ray™ and HD DVD content for both VC-1 and H.264 codecs, as well as Mpeg files. In the SAPPHIRE HD 5000 series the UVD has been enhanced to be able simultaneously to decode two 1080p HD video streams and to be able to display HD video in high quality with Windows Aero mode enabled. HDMI capability has also been upgraded to HDMI 1.3a with Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio support.

The SAPPHIRE HD 5000 series is supported by AMD’s DirectX 11 WHQL certified graphics driver for Windows 7 and Vista which delivers support for all of the key DirectX 11 level features required for new gaming experiences and acceleration of next generation high performance applications.

The SAPPHIRE HD 5970 OC is shipping from 18th November. Full retail editions will include a copy of BattleForge and a coupon for Dirt2 – the PC version of this exciting driving game which has full DirectX 11 support.