IT News HeadLines (Elite Bastards) 19/02/2010

Elite Bastards review: Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 Toxic 1GB

If the Radeon HD 5870 is overkill for your specific gaming needs, then the Radeon HD 5850 could well be the graphics board for you.آ If the reference design bores you however, then today Sapphire have launched a part which might well grab your attention - The Radeon HD 5850 Toxic, complete with some notable core and memory overclocks as well as a custom, vapour chamber cooling solution.آ We take a look to see if it's a must buy card.

Given its Toxic subtitle, it's fair to expect some factory overclocks from Sapphire's offering here, and thankfully that's exactly what we get, with the company boosting that 725MHz reference core clock speed to 765MHz (a modest 40MHz increase) while the card's 1GB of GDDR5 gets some real attention, with the 1000MHz memory sported by a stock card upgraded to a blistering 1125MHz on the Radeon HD 5850 Toxic.

While Sapphire's Radeon HD 5870 went for a rugged-looking cooling solution, the Radeon HD 5850 Toxic goes for something rather more shiny and colourful, with a dual-slot cooler that covers the entirety of the PCB's front, while also positioning itself to exhaust any hot air reasonably well from the rear of the system chassis.

Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 Toxic 1GB video card review

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AMD Catalyst 10.2 released

We told you all about it earlier, and now you can try them out for yourself, for AMD's Catalyst 10.2 drivers are here!

ATI Catalystâ„¢ application profiles for ATI CrossFireXâ„¢ supported configurations

This release of ATI Catalystâ„¢ delivers support for the latest ATI CrossFireXâ„¢ profiles in a separate executable file, ensuring users have access to the absolute latest set of profiles installed on their PC.

- The ATI Catalystâ„¢ 10.2 package includes the fully qualified ATI Catalystâ„¢ 10.2 application profile list (which includes all ATI CrossFireX profiles) and is installed by default
- The latest application profile list is posted on amd.com in a separate .exe file that users can install to get the absolute latest application profiles (that have not yet been added to the official ATI Catalystâ„¢ release)

ATI Catalystâ„¢ support for PowerPlayâ„¢ on ATI CrossFireXâ„¢ technology supported configurations

Significant power saving benefits for users with ATI Radeonâ„¢ HD 5900 Series, ATI Radeonâ„¢ HD 5800 Series, and ATI Radeonâ„¢ HD 5700 Series setup in ATI CrossFireXâ„¢ configurations.

- Automatically enabled in the ATI Catalystâ„¢ driver for Windowsآ® 7 and Windows Vista
- Sets secondary GPU(s) engine and memory clocks to low levels and reduces voltage when the GPU(s) are not in use

ATI Catalystâ„¢ support for DisplayPort audio

This release of ATI Catalystâ„¢ provides support for DisplayPort audio for DisplayPort panels.

Support for ATI CrossFireXâ„¢ on Eyefinity configurations

The ATI Catalystâ„¢ 9.12 hotfix release provides ATI CrossFireXâ„¢ support on Eyefinity configurations, allowing users to take advantage of their additional GPUs for increased gaming performance when driving high resolution Eyefinity display groups.آ Supported on the ATI Radeonâ„¢ HD 5970 Series, ATI Radeonâ„¢ HD 5800 Series, ATI Radeonâ„¢ HD 5700 Series, and ATI Radeonâ„¢ HD 5600 Series.

Performance Improvements

The following performance gains are noticed with this release of Catalystâ„¢ 10.2:

- DiRT 2 – Overall performance improves up to 8% on ATI Radeon™ HD 5970, ATI Radeon™ HD 5800 series, and ATI Radeon™ HD 5700 series products
- Battleforge – CrossFire ATI Radeon™ HD 5870 performance improves up to 6%
- Unigine Heaven – DirectX 9 CrossFire performance has improved significantly on ATI Radeon™ HD 5700 and ATI Radeon™ HD 5800 series products
-آ The Chronicles of Riddick – Assault on Dark Athena – Overall performance on ATI Radeonâ„¢ HD 5970 improves up to 4%

You can download these drivers for yourself from AMD's Game web site.

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Metro 2033 to support DirectX 11

You can tell that NVIDIA's GF100 parts are back on track when the company starts co-announcing DirectX 11 game titles, and that's exactly what they've done today, revealing that THQ's forthcoming Metro 2033 will make use of the new API as well as utilising NVIDIA's own PhysX technology.

THQ Inc. (NASDAQ:THQI) and NVIDIA today announced that Metro 2033, the upcoming first person shooter from 4A Games, will support a number of advanced DX11 features with the latest generation of DX11 graphics cards, as well as NVIDIA 3D Vision support. Metro 2033 will also feature advanced, hardware accelerated physical effects using NVIDIA PhysX.

Gamers with DX11 cards will experience advanced Depth of Field effects as well as Full Tessellation on character models.

Firing Squad have THQ and NVIDIA's full press release, while you can see a handful of DirectX 11 screenshots from the game over at Flickr.

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AMD Catalyst 10.2 and 10.3 driver discussion

Earlier today, we took our own look at the features coming in AMD's Catalyst 10.2 and 10.3 driver releases, as well as taking some time to chat to "Catalyst Maker" Terry Makedon.آ Of course, we aren't the only ones to have looked into these new drivers, so here's the rest of the coverage you can find around the web.

- Elite Bastards (Catalyst 10.2 and 10.3 feature preview)
- Elite Bastards (Terry Makedon interview)
- Anandtech
- [H]ard|OCP
- PC Perspective
- Rage 3D
- Tech Gage
- Tweak Town

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