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AMD's Radeon HD 5870: Bringing About the Next Generation Of GPUs

 by Ryan Smith on September 23, 2009 9:00 AM EST
327 Comments | Add A Comment
327 Comments

Angle-Independent Anisotropic Filtering At Last

For a number of years now the quality of anisotropic filtering has been slowly improving. Early implementations from AMD and NVIDIA were highly angle-dependent, resulting in a limited improvement to image quality from such filtering. The angle-dependent nature lead to shimmering and other artifacting that was not ideal.

As of the previous generation of cards, the quality of anisotropic filtering had become pretty good. NVIDIA’s best filtering mode was pretty close to angle-independent, and AMD’s only slightly worse. Neither was perfect, but neither was bad either.


The Radeon HD 4890


The GeForce GTX 285

However so long as no one had an angle-independent implementation, there was room to improve. And AMD has gone there. The anisotropic filtering algorithm used by the 5000 series is now truly and completely angle-independent. There are no more filtering tricks being used.


The Radeon HD 5870: Perfection

As you can see, the MIP maps in our venerable D3D AF Tester are perfectly circular, the hallmark of an angle-independent implementation. With angle-independent filtering, this effectively marks the end of the filtering arms race. AMD has won, and should NVIDIA catch up in the future the two would merely be tied. There’s nowhere left to go for quality beyond angle-independent filtering at the moment.

AMD tells us that there is no performance hit with their new algorithm compared to their old one. This is a bit hard to test since we can’t enable the old algorithm on the 5870, but certainly whatever performance hit there is, is similarly minor. In all of the testing we’re doing today, you will see results done with 16x anisotropic filtering used.

What you won’t see however is a difference, particularly with our static screenshots. When discussing the matter, AMD noted that the difference in perceived quality between the old algorithm and the new one was practically the same. After looking at matters we find ourselves in agreement with AMD; we were not able to come up with any situations where there was a noticeable difference, beyond the obvious AF quality tests that are designed to identify such changes.

Regardless of the outcome, AMD deserves kudos for making angle-independent anisotropic filtering happen. It’s demonstrably perfect filtering with no speed hit versus the previous generation of filtering; making it in essence a “free” improvement in image quality, however slight the real-world results are. We’re always ready to get better image quality out of our video cards, after all.

More GDDR5 Technologies: Memory Error Detection & Temperature Compensation The Return of Supersample AA
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  • T2k - Thursday, September 24, 2009 - link

    quote:
    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.


    Just whatF are you talking about, seriously? Is this some kind of new urban BS again?
    Look at other sites, they DID test it with ET:QW:
    http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ATI/Radeon_HD_5...">http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ATI/Radeon_HD_5...
    http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/rad...">http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/rad...

    and so on. BTW L4D is a passing fart in the wind while ET:QW is still going strong, stronger than UT3 (unfortunately because UT3 looks 10x better and the old ONS mode was awesome but Epic fucked it in UT3)

    Read other reviews before you post:
    http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid...">http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...amp;thre...

  • SiliconDoc - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link

    I see by your review links the 5870 just doesn't do well in ET:QW, everything else is closer to it and it gets beat worse, at 2560 high aa&af GTX295 slams it by 20%, so, of course, it was left out, in order to "pump up the percieved red number".
    -
    It's "not a good appearance".

    You'll just have to live with it for now like the rest of us.

  • number58 - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link

    Is this card any closer to saturating the pci-express 2.0 x16 slot? That was one of the big arguments in the P55 vs X58 debate. Would there be any loss of performance using these in crossfire on P55 compared to X58?
    Otherwise, great article. I think I'll be hanging on to my 4890 for a while though.

  • Kaleid - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link

    Look here for an answer:
    http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_5870_PCI...">http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_5870_PCI...

  • number58 - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link

    Thanks. That just about settles it. My next system will be Lynnfield based.

  • Zeratul - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link

    Please add support for Stereoscopic 3D, ATI. I'm not going back to play games in 2D, though I don't like nvidia's monopoly in that.

  • Arbie - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link

    Not just a review but an excellent technical discussion. It must have been a lot of work. Thanks for all of that, and do please follow up where you can on people's requests for more info on this very important card.

    Kudos to ATI/AMD for such an achievement. It looks like Nvidia is in big trouble.

    Arbie

  • SiliconDoc - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link

    rofl - Nvidia is in big trouble ? LOL
    Have you looked at the charts on wiki that predicted what this review shows ? Maybe you should take a gander at the Nvidia chart, now, and cry.
    --
    It is a nice review, although biased red here as usual.
    --
    I'd like to mention as he fretted about heat because of the 1/2 vent on the back of the card, I didn't notice overt despairing mention of the TWO rectangular exhaust ports on the fan end BLOWING HEAT INTO THE CASE.... which of course is deserved. Nice how that was held back as if overlooked. (Boy what trouble for Nvidia! hahha)
    Next we'll be told the red rooster tester put his hand next to the two internal exhaust ports, and "the air felt rather cool" so "rest assured not much heat is being pushed into your case", and "this doesn't matter".
    See, the trouble is already in the article, the trouble it took to spin it just so for Ati... lol... it's hilatrious!

  • ClownPuncher - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link

    Bizzarro SnakeOil, is that you?

  • SiliconDoc - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link

    No, this is me, the same me I've always been.
    Would you like to comment on the two internal exhaust ports of the 5870 that put sweltering heat into your case ?
    I guess you tried to ignore that entirely.
    You can always insult me again and avoid commenting on the heating exhaust ports ramping up your case temps on the 5870...
    That of course would be "the right thing to do".
    Perhaps call me crazy, and avoid the topic, right, you're good at that, huh.
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