ATI Radeon HD 5970
6
And what’s AMD been doing
all this time? Semiconductor
company ATI was busy
building heaps of console chips right the
way through the ’90s and early ’00s,
and made some excellent GPUs in its
own right, such as the X1900 XTX. It
was later purchased by AMD in 2006.
After the abortive HD 2000 and 3000
series, the HD 4870 and 4850 were
quality cards, but the one that made the
biggest splash after the move was the
Radeon HD 5970. The HD 5970 was
essentially a large Cypress GPU,
1,024MB pool of memory, and a
sizeable 256-bit memory bus...
multiplied by two.
This twin-GPU tradition continued
right the way up to the AMD Radeon R9
295X2 and the Nvidia Titan Z. But once
multi-GPU support started dwindling,
solo cards became the predominant
form factor. And with multi-GPU
support in the developer’s court due
to the introduction of DirectX 12, they
may never return.
SPECS YEAR: 2009 / CORE CLOCK SPEED: 725MHZ / MEMORY:
2,048MB GDDR5 / TRANSISTORS: 4,308 MILLION /
PROCESS NODE: 40NM
HARDWAREPC GAMING LEGENDS
Dave’s fave
from the grave
NVIDIA 8800 GT
Dave James: I’ve gamed on more
graphics cards than I can remember.
My first Voodoo2 was transformative,
the Riva TNT was ace, and I’ve since
had twin Titans and dual-GPU Radeon
cards in my home rigs, but none hold
so dear a place in my heart as the 8800
GT. Forget the 8800 GTX, the GT
combined stellar performance, great
looks, and incredible value. I’ve still got
my single-slot, jet-black reference card- the very same one photographed
here and originally for PC Format issue
217 – and will never part with it.
THE ONE THAT MADE THE BIGGEST
SPLASH AFTER THE MOVE WAS
THE RADEON HD 5970