AMD has retaken the crown for superior graphical power with their ATI Radeon HD 5870 video card, and consumers have confirmed that this is the hottest graphics accelerator of the moment. Armed with 1600 shader cores, the 40nm Cypress GPU claims to push video game frame rates well-beyond what NVIDIA offers from their GeForce GTX 285 counterpart. While the list of DirectX 11 video games has just started to grow, with one of the first being a free Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) named BattleForge. Perhaps ATI has created the perfect storm for their Radeon HD 5800-series by offering a price-competitive graphics card with several free games included or available. While NVIDIA toils away with CUDA and PhysX, ATI is busy delivering the next generation of hardware for the gaming community to enjoy. Sapphire factory overclocks the Cypress GPU and adds their own custom cooling solution, named Vapor-X. In this article Benchmark Reviews tests the Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 Vapor-X video card 21161-03 against a cross-section of modern graphics accelerators.
