5900 series behind the corner

[Monstru]

You're actually the 4th editor who has confirmed the issues with me. Honestly, the card is behaving like it can't access its full memory alotment in situations that need a large framebuffer. It IS supposed to be a 2x 256-bit bus but ironically the ATI documentation does not mention anything about the bus...just clock speeds. That's a contrast to the HD 5800 and HD 5700 series documents that showed quite clearly their 256 and 128 bit specs.

Please believed me that I had the EXACT same feeling when I was reading the documentation and I noticed that the bus width is not there. Also, if you think that there is no GPU-Z out there capable of reading the specs correctly, you might get a "fishy" image about all this. So I also gave this a lot of thinking today, but I strongly think that the bus is 2 x 256 bit, due to the bandwidth that they show in the specs. However, the fact that a card which has a key selling point in working with 3 2560x1600 monitors, but however performs slower exactly in that resolution is at least...ironic
Luckily for ATI, the performance in 1920 and 1680 compensates for the behaviour in 2560 in some games, and most of the gamers do not own a 30" monitor yet.

LE - unbelievable - GPU-Z 0.3.6 does not work with ATi reference samples but it does work with retail cards...sigh...