The performance gains going from the HD 5870 to the HD 5970 in our 7680x1600 testing range from 30% up to 40% depending on the gaming title.  I think one of the limits we are seeing in these tests is that a 1GB framebuffer is just not enough to hold 7680x1600 resolution images, textures, handle AA, etc and thus we might actually see a bigger boost with a 2GB buffer instead.

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Physically, the card is just as monstrous as its characteristics. It measures 28 cm and exceed the most ATX motherboards. Its heat sink occupies two slots.

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Even though this is a dual-GPU-card it only draws about 42W of power when in idle mode. AMD has managed this by improving their power saving method “ATI Powerplay” so that it puts one of the GPU’s in sleep mode when it is not needed.

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Today AMD is launching the 5970, their dual-GPU card that finishes building out AMD’s technical domination of the high-end market. With it AMD delivers the absolute victory over NVIDIA’s GTX 295 that the Radeon 5870 couldn’t quite achieve and at the same time sets the new high water mark for single-card performance.

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We are not impressed with the MSRP of $599. It is questionable as to what value it brings in current games. Future games maybe, but right now? We are also not impressed with driver issues that keep cropping up in recent games, and what seems like a lack of focus on features and performance in brand new game titles as soon as they hit the shelves.

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The result of this is that AMD has had to bring its dual-chip cards to market simply to compete with nVidia's top-end single chip cards (not to mention nVidia's dual-chip cards as well). However, this time around we have a slightly different situation. While the HD 5870 still isn't the out and out fastest card - the nVidia GeForce GTX 295 and ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 (both dual-chip cards) still trade places for top spot with it - it's the clear choice of the three due to its support of DirectX 11, its lower power consumption, and better compatibility thanks to its single chip (while CrossFire/SLI support is getting ever better, some games still have issues with these dual-chip solutions).

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The Radeon HD 5970 packs two AMD Cypress GPUs with 1600 stream processors each (total 3200), and holds 1 GB of GDDR5 memory across a 256-bit wide memory interface per GPU (total 2 GB of memory on board, across a 2x 256-bit wide memory interface).

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