AMD has leap-frogged NVIDIA by launching the DirectX 11 compatible Radeon HD 5870 video card. 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 Battle Forge. 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. In this article, Benchmark Reviews compares the Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 video card, model 21161-00-50R, against a cross-section of modern graphics accelerators.
