Introduction

The RADEON HD 5670 from AMD represents a very nice addition to the 5xxx series, features DirectX11 support and does not need an extra power connector to function. The card was aimed from the beginning against the GT 240 from Nvidia, let's find out if it stands a chance!



At first I would like to thank AMD for making this review possible.



About AMD:

“ Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) (NYSE: AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Sunnyvale, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for commercial and consumer markets. Its main products include microprocessors, motherboard chipsets, embedded processors and graphics processors for servers, workstations and personal computers, and processor technologies for handheld devices, digital television, automobiles, game consoles, and other embedded systems applications.

AMD is the second-largest global supplier of microprocessors based on the x86 architecture and also one of the largest supplier of graphics processing units. It also owns 8.6% of Spansion, a supplier of non-volatile flash memory.[2] In 2009, AMD ranked ninth among semiconductor manufacturers in terms of revenue.”

Product Features

• Expand your visual real estate across up to three displays and get lost in the action with ATI Eyefinity Technology
  
• Using ATI Stream technology, accelerate demanding applications and do more than ever with your PC
  
• Enjoy rich, realistic visuals with explosive performance
  
• Consumes less than 75 Watts under full load, eliminating the need for an external power connection and making installation a snap
  
• ATI CrossFireX™ technology dual mode support
  
• Ultra-high bandwidth GDDR5 memory

Product Specifications

The RADEON HD 5600 series take part from the budget segment of DirectX11 video cards offering from AMD. Nvidia does also have some cards that fit in the budget series, on 40nm, the GeForce GT 240; unfortunately, these do not support DirectX11, but only 10.1.

The affordable 5670 video card we are going to test next shares most of the features with the higher performance video cards from the 5000 series (including Eyefinity, meaning that we can connect up to 3 monitors on a single video card [if the video card version features at least one DisplayPort]).



The card is very surprising in the power consumption department, meaning that we do not have to use an extra PCI Express power connector, all is provided by the PCI Express 2.0 slot, which does have a 75W power limitation. This makes it a very good choice for HTPC configurations too.

Redwood block diagram



The Redwood architecture does have 5 SIMD units, each containing 80 ALUs and tied to one texture unit. After doing the math, we get a total of 400 stream processors (or ALUs), compared to the RADEON HD 5770 which has a double number of processors; the ROPs have also been reduced from 16 to 8. The 5670 does share, though, the same memory interface width with the 5770: 128bit.

The latest GPUs from AMD fully support DirectX11 instructions which include GPGPU (DirectCompute 11), tessellation and improved multi-threading; they also come with Shader Model 5, better shadows and HDR texture compression.

Tesselation, as described on the Unigine website, is a “scalable technology aimed for automatic subdivision of polygons into smaller and finer pieces, so that developers can gain a more detailed look of their games almost free of charge in terms of performance. Thanks to this procedure, the elaboration of the rendered image finally approaches the boundary of veridical visual perception: the virtual reality is vivified at your fingertips delivering engaging gaming experience.”

Here is a modeled house inside the Unigine Heaven benchmark, without and with the tessellation feature enabled:

The multi-threaded rendering is similar to the techniques applied for the current CPUs. If a shader or an instruction has to be queued up, the process creates a delay. The current GPUs can now process data completely threaded, which bring a better overall performance.

The DirectCompute feature allows access to the GPU for stream computing; it shares a range of computational interfaces with its competitors: OpenCL and CUDA.

Eyefinity is an advanced multiple-display technology from AMD which enables a single GPU to support up to six independent display outputs simultaneously. The six high-resolution displays can be operated simultaneously and independently, configured in various combinations of landscape and portrait orientations.

We can group multiple monitors into a large integrated display surface, enabling windowed and full screen 3D applications, images and video to span across multiple displays as one desktop workspace. ATI Eyefinity supports Duplicated Mode operation (PC desktop cloned on multiple displays) and Extended Mode (PC desktop extended across multiple displays).