ATI Radeon HD 5970 Supports DirectX 11

The ATI Radeon HD 5970 announced today is billed as the fastest graphics card ever made. It boasts a score of X12011.1 in 3DMark Vantage Extreme preset, the highest recorded single-card score. The tested system featured a 3.33GHz Intel Core i7 965 processor, Gigabyte EX58-UD5 motherboard, Corsair XMS 6GB memory (1600MHz), Windows 7 RTM x64, ATI Radeon HD 5970 1GB GDDR5.

More importantly, it ijoins the growing family of the the first graphics cards to fully support Microsoft DirectX 11 and ATI Eyefinity multi-display for up to three monitors. DirectX 11 games available now include BattleForge and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.:Call of Pripyat. Other titles on the way include Battlefield Bad Company 2, DiRT™ 2 (expected December 1, 2009) and Rebellion’s Aliens vs. Predator.

Extra headroom for overclocking is designed into the HD 5970, and clock speed multipliers have been unlocked for the GPU and the graphics memory. Software is included that helps you overclock the card. The card is shipping now and is also available in desktop PCs shipping now, like the Alienware Area-51 and Area-51 ALX models. Price tag is in the $1200 range.

So is this monster card of any use for the average user? Anandtech has a great hands-on review of the new card that concludes:

“There are two things that become very clear when looking at our data for the 5970
1. It’s hands down the fastest single card on the market
2. It’s so fast that it’s wasted on a single monitor....
... There’s a market out there for $1200 in video cards, but you had better be running 3 30” monitors in Eyefinity mode to make use of it.”