It's no secret that one of the reason we see an ever improving performance curve of the common PC is the games industry moving forward at a rapid pace. Computer games are bringing tons of money and at the same time game developers are in the lead when it comes to truly utilizing all of the performance available with our computers. Even if we all enjoy a fast computer when we're e-mailing or editing pictures for our Facebook albums they are far from the most enduring of tasks.
The limits are moved forward every day and since 3Dfx announced the Voodoo accelerator card 3D graphics cards have become one of the most important components of a modern PC. To be realistic AMD and NVIDIA are the only graphics card manufacturers with a serious impact on game development. Even though Intel sells tremendously large amounts of graphics circuits through its integrated chipsets these are not good for much else the showing your desktop, relatively of course.
After announcing updated versions of its then current GPUs it's time for both AMD and NVIDIA to present completely new architectures and graphics card families, AMD is first to present Evergreen.
Behind the code name hides an armada of GPUs and the one we are going to look at today is called Cypress, but is also known as RV870. Like other GPUs of the Evergreen family, Cypress is made with 40nm technology and supports Microsoft's latest graphics API, DirectX 11. A technology AMD often talks about, loud and clear, and we will be looking closer at it in this article.
Cypress will be AMD's most powerful GPU of the Evergreen family and it has announced two different models, ATI Radeon HD 5870 and Radeon HD 5850. We will be testing AMD's addition to the Radeon HD 5000 series, but first we will be presenting the Evergreen family and what we can expect within the near future.
