ATI launches Radeon HD 5700 graphics series

Complete with DirectX 11 capabilities

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13 October 2009 5:01 GMT / By Duncan Geere

ATI has just released a new series of graphics cards - the Radeon HD 5700s. Two cards initially make up the range, there's the Radeon HD 5750 and the meatier Radeon HD 5770. Both come with DirectX 11 capabilities and a host of other features that PC tweakers might be interested in.

The company says that this Radeon release is "all about future-proofing your graphics card". It reckons that this generation of cards can cope on high settings with every game currently out and in the near future, too. Plenty of DirectX 11 games are due out before Christmas, including DiRT2, Stalker: Call of Pripyat, and Battleforge that already has a patch that converts it to DX 11.

DirectX 11 brings tessellation, shader model 5, Directcompute 11, HDR texture compression and better multi-threading performance. The cards also support HDMI 1.3, have stream technology support, and come with three outputs so you can play with three monitors at 3 x 2560 x 1600 in what ATI is calling an "Eyefinity" setup.

The 5770 has 1.36 teraFLOPs of computing power and low-ish power consumption of 108W under load and 18W when idle. It comes with 1GB of GDDR5 memory and will cost $159. There's no UK pricing yet.

The 5750, on the other hand has 1.008 teraFLOPs of computing power and will take up 86W of power under load and 16W when idle. That'll come with the option of 1GB or 512MB of memory, with the former costing $129 and the latter costing more like $110. We'd be surprised if UK prices were lower, even at a 1 to 1 conversion rate.

Still, they're not exceptionally high either, meaning that if you're considering an upgrade then it might be worth asking for one of these in your stocking this Christmas.