Anandtech has a performance preview of the new ATI Mobility Radeon 5000 Series. These are the first DirectX 11 graphics chips for the mobile arena. Of course, you need games that can support DirectX 11 to really make that worth your while. Another benefit that ATI is touting is that these graphics chips will be using GDDR5. GDDR5 runs at lower voltages, sends four bits of data per clock cycles (instead of two bits for GDDR3), and costs more.
ATI is releasing the HD 5870 as its top-of-the-line chip. The 5870 has 800 stream processors running at 700 MHz. The 5750 and 5650 are on the next level down. They have 400 stream processors running at 650 MHz for the 5700 and 550 MHz for the 5650. The 5400 series is the slowest of the group with 80 stream processors running at 750 MHz. It is this part that I would expect to see in the coming months in laptops.
[In] speaking with ATI we were informed that 70% of sales have been 4300/4500 parts – the lowest performing, least expensive offerings. 15% of sales are from the 4600 series, which is where reasonable gaming can finally enter the picture. As for the 4800 series, it’s still sitting at less than 5% (with the remainder of ATI’s sales apparently coming from older 3000 series parts).
This article is not a review, since Anandtech does not have any hardware to benchmark. Instead they are just left with PowerPoint slides from ATI showing benchmark results.
