The PC Report

As per every month, ATI has released a new Catalyst driver for their range of graphics cards. Version 10.8 brings with it full OpenGL ES 2.0 support for Windows XP and up as well as Linux, anti-aliasing for StarCraft II and performance improvements for Far Cry 2, Left 4 Dead 2 and Stormrise. The usual amount of bugs have also been fixed.

Interestingly enough, in these new drivers from AMD a number of code names for as many as 35 unreleased ATI graphics cards have been uncovered. These code names are for the upcoming Radeon HD 6000 Series GPUs (codenamed “Southern Islands”), and include a number of related codes including Cayman, Antilles, Blackcomb, Barts, Whistler, Onega, Turks, Seymour, Caicos, and Caspian.

While we await more details of the HD 6000 series, head over to the AMD Game website where you can download the latest ATI Catalyst 10.8 driver. Head below if you want the release notes for the driver.

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Today’s the day another update for the ATI range of graphics card drivers (known as Catalyst if you haven’t been following our posts) has been released. It supports enhancements for ATI’s Eyefinity Technology and HydraVision including new support for Eyefinity on all ATI-supported Linux distributions, enhancements for those of you using rotated displays on CrossfireX setups and finally a fix for allowing GPU acceleration in VLC 1.1.1, which you can see how well it works below.

If you care about the full released notes to see what your updating you can head below as usual, or if you feel like downloading the drivers straight off head to the ATI Catalyst driver website. Don’t forget to check out how well GPU decoding in VLC 1.1.1 performs on the latest drivers, previewed below.

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Close to the release of the Nvidia drivers for this month, ATI has released an update to their drivers for the month of June. The update brings support for GPU acceleration in Flash Player 10.1, a few video playback enhancements and support for OpenGL 4.0 and 3.3. 2D acceleration has also been improved for Linux users. Full feature changelog is below as usual.

If you are an ATI graphics card user, take the time to download and update your drivers now. You can download the Catalyst 10.6 update from the usual location.

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ATI Catalyst is back this month with another driver release for May: 10.5. Apart from the usual bug fixes, ATI has added support for 120 Hz monitors for Radeon 3000 and 4000 series cards. Numerous games have also received updates including Alien vs. Predator, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, Mass Effect 2, Resident Evil 5, Splinter Cell Conviction and more. To download the drivers, head to the Catalyst website here or you can just view the release notes below.

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ATI has pumped out their Catalyst drivers for this month kinda late, which is unusual but good all the same. The new drivers – 10.4 – add support for 5.1 channel H.264 playback through all players as well as transcoding improvements and new formats supported. The usual amount of bugs fixes and performance updates are also packed into this release. The full list of new features for the ATI Catalyst 10.4 drivers are below and you can download them from the usual place.

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Yeah, you read the title right – an XFX ATI Radeon HD 5970 Black Edition is up for sale on eBay… with the current bid sitting at US$999,999. The card is a yet-to-be-released special edition HD 5970 dual-GPU card, packing 4GB of GDDR5 memory (presumably 2GB per GPU) and 6 mini-DisplayPorts for a 6-monitor Eyefinity setup similar to the HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition. XFX are planning to make only 1,000 of these cards with the card up for sale bearing the serial #63.

While the seller didn’t specify how he obtained this graphics card, he does state “you have no idea how hard it was for me to get this card” – maybe he stole it? He also states that he doesn’t have a box, user manual or drivers for the graphics card but he will give you the awesome gun case that the card is stored in, along with several adapters, CrossFire bridge and a Black Edition Overclocking Tool. The auction currently has 8 days to go.

Edit: It seems the million dollar bid was a fake. The current, seemingly legitimate bid is sitting at US$10,201

Today we’re taking a deep look into which out of the two flagship single-GPU graphics cards from ATI and Nvidia is the better buy for your system. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 480 was released into the realm of graphics cards just last week, and the ATI Radeon HD 5870 has been with us for a good six months now.

Both cards support the latest and greatest DirectX 11 technology, each with their own specifications, performance upsides, extra features and also downsides. And each card has a different price point. We look at hopefully everything there is to each of the cards to determine which card is most deserving of your hard-worked cash. Let’s start off with the specifications of each card.

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Fresh of the production line at ATI is the ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition. The card differs slightly from the standard HD 5870 in that it has 6 DisplayPort outputs to power 6 monitors in an Eyefinity setup. The Eyefinity 6 Edition also sports 2GB of graphics memory to support the extra monitors, up from 1GB on the standard 5870. Card power has also increased slightly to support the extra RAM.

This is the first card to support a 6-monitor setup and was supposed to be released several months ago, but due to Windows hardware restrictions that apparently allow a maximum of 4 monitors connected to the one computer ATI had to delay the card until they could figure out a workaround. An ATI Eyefinity 6-display setup is pictured below. One downside of the 3×2 monitor setup as noted by HotHardware is that when playing first-person shooter games, the centred crosshair is split between the two monitors and you have the bezel in the middle.

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ATI has pumped out another iteration of their Catalyst graphics card drivers for March – 10.3. ATI Catalyst 10.3 comes loaded with new features for those with Eyefinity-supporting cards, including bezel compensation and multiple Eyefinity groups. Also on the list of new features is support for stereoscopic 3D glasses at 120 Hz so 3rd party vendor’s glasses will work.

Of course, along with major feature releases is the usual list of bug fixes and performance improvements. You can download the latest drivers from the ATI website. Check below for the full list of new features in Catalyst 10.3, or leave your comments on the performance of the drivers below.

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This is now the 8th card to be released into ATI’s Evergreen GPU family and this time it will bridge the gap between the HD 5770 and HD 5850. The ATI Radeon HD 5830 packs the same Eyefinity, DirectX 11 and PowerPlay support as it’s older brothers, and comes loaded with 1GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 1000 MHz. Joining in with the 5870 and 5850, the GPU present on the board contains 2.15 billion transistors, however it has only 1120 stream processors, 56 texture units and a core clock speed of 800 MHz – the total power of the card is 1.79 TFLOPS.

Looking at the card (check the pic above) you’ll see that the card is roughly the same size as the HD 5870, and almost identical in design. It comes with two DVI ports, HDMI with audio and a DisplayPort (perfect for 3 display Eyefinity). It’s also a dual-slot card and needs two 6-pin PCIe power inputs to support the card’s 175W max power, which is higher than the HD 5850 due to a higher core clock; the idle power is lower though at 25W.

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