ATI RADEON GRAPHICS CARDS

ATI Radeon graphics cards will no longer be seen. The company was purchased by Advance Micro Devices (AMD) several years ago. AMD has finally chosen to brand the graphics cards as AMD Radeon. With the AMD Fusion APUs and the Intel core i processors having graphics as part of the CPU separate graphics solutions whether discrete or integrated are becoming less common.

Although many of them are fast cards, I would be somewhat reluctant to buy a new laptop with an ATI Radeon graphics card now. It basically indicates that the design is at least a year old.

ATI Radeon graphics cards briefly were the fastest for laptop computers and AMD Radeon also was briefly at the top of the heap with the AMD HD Radeon 6990M. A Nvidia product has claimed that spot.

Even now, when you compare graphics cards, almost any ATI or AMD card will leave Intel graphics accelerators in the dust, both the separate cards associated with the older CPUs (GMA 4500HD) and the on-chip accelerator on the new core i chips, for most uses. Intel video accelerators do have an advantage for some tasks where Intel has proprietary hardware to speed up the task.

The ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 is still an exceptionally fast mobile card even though it is no longer the the fastest single card available. The newer top end cards are even faster.The remainder of the 5000 series are also fast, top end cards, although the 128 bit memory bus does seem to be holding them back. Only the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 is available in a crossfire version. Besides this card and 2 new SLI Nvidia graphics cards, the same older crossfire (ATI) or SLI (NVidia) cards are still the fastest cards. The new ATI cards are Direct x 11 compliant, the first available in laptops. They are no longer the only cards that are though.

Cards which are not Direct X 11 compliant will not be able to get the maximum performance from the newest games. More than 20 direct x 11 games are in development. The cards also deliver output to HDMI. Graphics cards today almost always provide HDMI output, even Intel Graphics Accelerators.

Graphics card comparisons that concentrate on speed are only part of the story though. Power consumption and the graphics card's impact on battery life are also important to most users. The new 5000 series card have TDPs that are about the same as the power usage of the 4000 series that is out on the market now. Like I always say, more speed means shorter battery life and more heat. If you don't have better cooling, the increased heat can result in a shorter life for the entire laptop.

There are very few laptop computers available today with AMD Radeon 6990 graphics cards although several have been announced.

ATI Radeon graphics cards to laptop video cards

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