AMD's Radeon HD 5870: Bringing About the Next Generation Of GPUs
by Ryan Smith on September 23, 2009 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
The Test
We should note that for the AMD cards we are using two sets of drivers. The drivers distributed to reviewers for use with the 5870 are version 8.66, and contain support for the 4000 and 5000 series. We are told that these drivers will be made available to 5000 series owners when the “board is released”, which should mean today.
For the 3000 series, we are using Catalyst 9.9, the most recent driver set that supports that series.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-920 @ 3.33GHz |
| Motherboard: | Intel DX58SO (Intel X58) |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.1.1.1015 (Intel) |
| Hard Disk: | Intel X25-M SSD (80GB) |
| Memory: | Patriot Viper DDR3-1333 3 x 2GB (7-7-7-20) |
| Video Cards: |
ATI Raden HD 5870 |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 190.62 |
| OS: | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
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Ryan Smith - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
The load temp is the same as a single card.ilnot1 - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
Does anyone have a link to any review that compares 4850's, 4870's, and 4890's in Crossfire against the 5870 & 5870 CF setup?T2k - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
FWIW: http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_5870_PCI...">http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_5870_PCI...T2k - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
Ehh, I meant: http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ATI/Radeon_HD_5...">http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ATI/Radeon_HD_5...ilnot1 - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
Thanks T2k, but the only cards that are in Crossfire in that review are the 58XX's. There are no other comparisons to cards in CF or SLI. Since Ryan included some of the most recent nVida cards in SLI I was hoping to find the 48XX's in CF.T2k - Thursday, September 24, 2009 - link
Basically the rule of thumb seems to be that at 1920x1200 a single 5870 is still slightly slower than 4870X2 and probably slightly faster than a 4850X2 2GB.I own the latter so I will wait this time - either they lower the initial price of the 5870X2 or they release a 5850X2, otherwise I'll pass because single 5870 is simply OVERPRICED as it is already.
T2k - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
Seriously: we get a very nice technical background section - then you top it with this more than idiotic collection of games for testing, leaving out 4850X2 2GB, 5850, using TWO stupid CryEngine-based PoS from Crytek, the most un-optimized code producers or WoW, of which even you admit it's CPU-bounded but now CoD:WaW, no Clear Sky, no UT3 or rather a single current Unreal Eninge-based game?Benchmarking part is ALMOST WORTHLESS, the only useful info is that unless you go above 1920x1200 the 4870X2 pretty much owns 5870's @ss as of now.
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
For what it's worth, Batman: Arkham Asylum is UE3 engine based.T2k - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
OK, I missed that (probably because I found the game shots ugly and became uninterested.)But how about ET:QW? Yes, it's not the best looking game but it is still popular, let alone World at War which is both great looking and crazy popular, let alone Clear Sky which is a very demanding DX10.1 game? Where is Fallout 3? Where is Modern Warfare?
FFS the most demanding are the quick ation-shooters and we, FPS players are the first one to upgrade to new cards...
Werelds - Thursday, September 24, 2009 - link
How would ET:QW be a good benchmark? Last I checked, it's still limited to the 30 FPS animations, which makes running it at more than 30 FPS pointless because everything will look jerky.I agree something like the CoD games should be included for comparison's sake, but they're hardly a good benchmark or taxing on a system. QW does not fall into the same category though, it has a smaller active playerbase than even L4D which lost a lot of players due to the lack of updates.