But AMD had a secret weapon: the (codenamed Hemlock). They simply glued two Cypress chips onto one board via a PLX bridge chip. The HD 5970 was a dual-GPU monster that became the fastest graphics card on the planet for over a year. It was so fast that it held the performance crown until NVIDIA’s GTX 580 launched a full year later.
The HD 5000 series was more than a product. It was a statement: Never count AMD out. And for one glorious year—from December 2009 to late 2010—they were the undisputed kings of the graphics card world. The dragon had been slain, and the legend of Evergreen was written. amd radeon hd 5000
DirectX 11 was a massive deal. It introduced (smoother surfaces), Compute Shaders (using the GPU for non-graphics tasks), and better multi-threading. NVIDIA’s current cards only supported DirectX 10. AMD realized that if they could launch a full DX11 lineup before NVIDIA, they would own the future. But AMD had a secret weapon: the (codenamed Hemlock)