Product Features

• 1GB GDDR5 memory
  
• ATI Eyefinity technology with support for up to three displays
  
• Windows 7 support
  
• ATI Stream technology
  
• Designed for DirectCompute 5.0 and OpenCL
  
• Accelerated Video Transcoding (AVT)
  
• Compliant with DirectX® 11 and earlier revisions
  
• Supports OpenGL 3.2
  
• 40 nm Process technology
  
• ATI CrossFireX™ multi-GPU support for highly scalable performance
  
• ATI Avivo™ HD video and display technology
  
• Dynamic power management with ATI PowerPlay™ technology
  
• Display Port, HDMI, 2xDL-DVI
  
• PCI Express® 2.1 support

Product Specifications

The RADEON 5830 from AMD was designed to fill in the gap between the 5770 and the 5850, having the same features of the more powerful cards.

RADEON HD 5830 does come with the Cypress LE code name, “Cypress” being the code name for the high end series of AMD’s 5*** generation.

5830 shares the same transistor number as its more powerful brothers, the 5850 and the 5870, but some chip internals are disabled from the factory; because of this, the 5830 does have 1120 shader processors, compared with the 5830 with 1440 shader processors or the 5870 with 1600 shader processors.

Here is a RADEON HD 5870 Block Diagram which shows the disabled parts on the 5830:



Some people would ask if it is possible to re-enable those missing shader processors; well, unfortunately it is not because they are laser cut. AMD has decided to disable these processors as a process of eliminating wafer errors: the portions of the chip that seemed defective in the initial factory tests were physically disconnected. In the distant past, some ATI cards that were considered to have chip defects had portions disabled with the help of the BIOS and people could re-enable them by a simple BIOS flash or with the help of Rivatuner; sometimes, enabling those parts would get you a much better board performance, but some people were unlucky, meaning that those disabled parts were indeed defective and started to get artefacts.



The latest GPUs from AMD fully support DirectX11 instructions which include GPGPU (DirectCompute 11), tessellation and improved multi-threading; they also come with Shader Model 5, better shadows and HDR texture compression.

Tesselation, as described on the Unigine website, is a “scalable technology aimed for automatic subdivision of polygons into smaller and finer pieces, so that developers can gain a more detailed look of their games almost free of charge in terms of performance. Thanks to this procedure, the elaboration of the rendered image finally approaches the boundary of veridical visual perception: the virtual reality is vivified at your fingertips delivering engaging gaming experience.”

Here is a modeled house inside the Unigine Heaven benchmark, without and with the tessellation feature enabled:

The multi-threaded rendering is similar to the techniques applied for the current CPUs. If a shader or an instruction has to be queued up, the process creates a delay. The current GPUs can now process data completely threaded, which bring a better overall performance.

The DirectCompute feature allows access to the GPU for stream computing; it shares a range of computational interfaces with its competitors: OpenCL and CUDA.

Eyefinity is an advanced multiple-display technology from AMD which enables a single GPU to support up to six independent display outputs simultaneously. The six high-resolution displays can be operated simultaneously and independently, configured in various combinations of landscape and portrait orientations.

We can group multiple monitors into a large integrated display surface, enabling windowed and full screen 3D applications, images and video to span across multiple displays as one desktop workspace. ATI Eyefinity supports Duplicated Mode operation (PC desktop cloned on multiple displays) and Extended Mode (PC desktop extended across multiple displays).