Sapphire touts ATI HD5500 graphics cards

GRAPHICS CARD MAKER Sapphire has come out with 'mainstream' ATI graphics cards, as well as a media software bundle deal with Arcsoft.

There are several models in its Sapphire HD5500 series, which is based on graphic architecture from the ATI division of AMD and built in a 40nm process. The various models have different memory configurations and display output options, which Sapphire said gives user choices for different applications and budgets.

The HD5500 family of graphics cards have 320 Stream processors and support both Microsoft's DirectX 11 and ATI Stream.

ATI Stream accelerates supported applications such as video transcoding. It can also support rendering and other tasks by executing instructions on the GPU chip rather than on the CPU.

The core technology of the HD5500 series is said to be low power without the need for an external power connection, so it should be good for upgrades of brand name consumer PCs that don't have high end power supplies.

Sapphire also said it has made a deal with Arcsoft for its TotalMedia Theatre 3 software, a media player that uses ATI Stream technology to provide decent video playback of Blu-ray content.

Purchasers of Sapphire's HD5500 series graphics cards get a 50 per cent discount on upgrading to 'gold' or 'platinum' versions of the Arcsoft software until 30 August. µ