VR-Zone

While the enthusiasts are getting crazy over the Radeon HD 5870 and Radeon HD 5850 cards, AMD keeps up the hype by showcasing us a machine fitted with a Hemlock graphics card. Due to launch later this year in Nov-Dec, a Hemlock card has two "Cypress" ASICs on it and it is priced below US$500. The point of this showcase is to tell the world that AMD committed and is keeping to its target of launching top to bottom Evergreen series within 5 months timeframe.

(Pardon me for the poor photos. They were taken using a camera phone cos my digital camera got screwed)

The Hemlock machine is running a Alien vs Predator tech demo, a DX11 title due out in Q1 next year sporting all the goodness of DX11 features such as character tessellation, detail tessellation on environment surfaces, High-Definition Ambient Occlusion (HDAO) etc. Although we can't predict how the actual DX11 gaming performance of AVP would pan out for Hemlock but the frame rates for the tech demo are encouraging at this point in time.

From the information we gathered, the Hemlock card is slightly longer than the Radeon HD 5870 card so it is probably around 12" long. You can expect 2 versions; Radeon HD 5870 X2 and HD 5850 X2 (marketing names yet to be confirmed). From the CCC, you can see that the card in the machine is clocked at 725MHz core and 1GHz memory and comes with 1GB GDDR5 memories so probably this is the 5850 X2 version. Note that AMD is still finalizing on the clocks and other details so nothing is confirmed at this point of time.