AMD Launches DirectX 11 Laptop Graphics Processors

Advanced Micro Devices announced new DirectX 11 mobile graphics processors which should bring improved graphics and application performance to Windows 7 laptops, the company said on Thursday. The company released ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5000 series graphics cards that are the fastest laptop processors the company has released to date. The graphics chips offer bandwidth for laptops to run two Blu-ray streams at once, said Asif Rehman, product manager for AMD's mobile graphics business. The 5000-series cards outperform the older 4000-series graphics cards by up to 40 percent, Rehman said. The high-end 5800-series graphics card includes 1.04 billion transistors and provides computing power of up to 1.12 teraflops, which AMD claims is the highest in the laptop category. The units can harness the parallel processing capabilities of GPUs to improve gaming and application performance on PCs, Rehman said. That is partly done by native hardware support for DirectX 11 tools that are built into Windows 7 by Microsoft. DirectX 11 tools include a set of APIs (application programming interfaces) for realistic images and sound when playing games or watching movies. The tools also help free up CPUs by off-loading multimedia tasks to graphics processors, which could speed up overall laptop performance. For example, processing of Flash videos could be off-loaded from the CPU to the latest ATI graphics cards, which could significantly speed performance.