The Radeon HD 5970: Completing AMD's Takeover of the High End GPU Market

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• prophet001 - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - link

  This looks like a sweet card. Certainly ATI is taking control of the market.
  
  One question though...
  
  What happened to the Hydra by Lucid Logix? I haven't heard anything about it in a while. Theoretically, the Hydra should take 2 ATI cards and make them perform better than Crossfire can.
  
  Any news?

• tamalero - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - link

  there as been reviews of HYDRA already, what planet are you on?
  

• GeorgeH - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - link

  1) No need to be a douche.
  
  2) No Hydra 200 products have shipped, all current "reviews" have been done using Lucid's development hardware.
  
  3) It appears that Hydra will not work well with dual GPU cards; it will see only one of the GPUs.
  
  4) Early results show that Hydra offers roughly equal performance overall to Crossfire/SLI.
  
  5) Link to one of the better articles I've read:
  http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=815">http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=815

• driver01z - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - link

  Wow - so we have a card now that plays the latest Crysis at 2560*1600, 4XAA with details at a smooth playable FPS. IMHO I believe we've entered a new GPU generation. Or new compared to the capabilities I'm used to.

• rcpratt - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - link

  Is there some way to set up a dual-monitor setup (2 x 1920x1080) to run in horizontal span mode (3840 x 1080), like you do with your three monitors, without an Eyefinity card? I'm currently running with a 4870 and haven't been able to find a way to do this.

• The0ne - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - link

  I haven't tried but you should be able to do this easily, using catalyst. There's an option there to flip your screens for horizontal/vertical views and duplicate/extend your screens. That should do it for you.
  
  I haven't use the flip feature but I use the extend all the time because I'm hooked up to my tv.

• rcpratt - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - link

  I've spent hours trying to find a way to do it with Catalyst, and I can't find one. Right now it's on extend, which just leaves the secondary monitor as the desktop, with no taskbar on the bottom, and leaves me unable to play games at 3840x1080.
  
  If anybody has an explanation or idea, I'd appreciate it.

• Spoelie - Thursday, November 19, 2009 - link

  To put it simple, no it's not supported. The only way you'll be able to use the second screen is with games that are explicitly coded to support dual screens (Supreme Commander?).
  
  Your only other option is to use a Matrox multimon device (forgot the name) or an EyeFinity card of course. No NVIDIA card will allow this either, it's not a driver issue.
  
  Either way, 2 screens wouldn't be a nice experience anyway, with the big bezel right in the middle, I can't imagine any type of game where that would work (no FPS, RTS, RPG, racing game, ...)

• rcpratt - Thursday, November 19, 2009 - link

  That's what I was afraid of. Thanks. And yeah, I wasn't planning on playing with 2 monitors, but I was considering getting a third. Oh well, probably better that I can't blow the cash :)

• The0ne - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - link

  On the same topic, does anyone know why my dual screen setup resets after PC restarts/shutdowns? In addition, I HAVE to select duplicate first, set it and then switch to extend. Selecting extend first doesn't enable it. Using current driver but this was there with previous versions as well.
  
  I've Googled and read many forums but haven't encountered many users having this particular issue. This is consistent in XP, Vista and Win7 as far as I can remember.
  
  4870 with Dell 30" and Samsumg 73" 1080P TV. Temperatures around 56C for video card. If you have any tips I appreciate them. Thanks in advance.