DirectX 11 Mobile Graphic Processors Officially Launched by AMD

The new DirectX 11 mobile graphics processors was officially launched by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) with the primary aim of improving graphics and application performance to Window 7 laptops.

ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5000-series graphics cards, which are the fastest laptop processors that the company has released to date, outperform the older 4000-series graphics cards by up to 40 percent.  Asif Rehman, product manager for AMD’s mobile graphics business, averred that the graphics chips proffer laptops bandwidth that can run two Blu-ray streams simultaneously.

AMD claims With its 1.04 billion transistors that supply computing power of up to 1.12 teraflops, the high-end 5800-series graphics cards is uppermost in the laptop category. Rehman also emphasized that the native hardware support for DirectX 11 tools built into Microsoft Windows 7 can maximize the parallel processing capabilities of GPUs for advanced gaming and application performance on PCs.

The set of application programming interfaces (APIs) included in DirectX 11 tools provides authentic images and sound when watching movies or playing games. The same tools also help to free up CPUs and enable the overall speed up of laptop performance by offloading multimedia tasks to graphic processors. For instance, Flash Video processing could be delegated to the latest ATI graphics cards and free up the CPU for highly significant speed performance.

One of the versatile attributes of 5000-series chips is the inclusion of support for the feature called UVD2, which enables laptops to decipher two high-definition video streams on a lone GPU. This marks the difference from the older 4000-series chips, which were only capable of handling one high-definition and one standard-definition stream at the same time. Another task that was not always easy with earlier graphic cards, but which can be carried out without any difficulty at all with the more advanced GPUs, is the ability to play back Blu-ray Video in the Windows Aero mode. The graphics cards also provide support to Eyefinity technology, which allows up to six multiple displays.

Power efficiency is another feature that distinguishes the 5000-series cards from earlier versions, besides the enhanced performance. By making the cards at the advanced 40-nanometer manufacturing process, AMD was able to achieve the ideal energy efficiency level. When in idle mode, the cards automatically adjust the power consumption of the engine and memory clock; thus, less power is utilized.

The presence of the native support for Vari-Bright on the graphics cards can also increase the laptop’s battery life. Though Vari-Bright was initially a software feature, the provision of hardware support can now reduce power usage by up to 50 percent in comparison to the software.

In previous years, most laptop graphic cards can either support the older DirectX 9.0c or DirectX 10.1. AMD’s rival Nvidia, made announcement for plans to come up with DirectX 11 processors, but has yet to release the hardware. Hence, AMD IS one of the first companies to publicly announce the introduction of laptop graphic cards that inherently support DirectX 11.

The cards will be directly available in laptops within the first semester of the year, with the following categories:

• The high-end 5800-series graphics cards are ideally for enthusiast laptops.
• The low-end 5430-series  GPU are excellent for light and thin laptops because they require low power consumption.
• The 5450, 5470, 5600 and 5700-series graphics cards are targeted for mainstream laptops.

The 5800-series graphics cards would be for laptop enthusiasts, while the low-end 5430-series GPU will be for thin and light laptops that require low power consumption. The 5450, 5470, 5600 and 5700-series graphics cards will be targeted at mainstream laptops. The cards will become directly available in laptops in the first half of the year.