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
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.
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Ryan Smith - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
We do have Cyberlink's software, but as it uses different code paths, the results are near-useless for a hardware review. Any differences could be the result of hardware differences, or it could be that one of the code paths is better optimized. We would never be able to tell.Our focus will always be on benchmarking the same software on all hardware products. This is why we bent over backwards to get something that can use DirectCompute, as it's a standard API that removes code paths/optimizations from the equation (in this case we didn't do much better since it was a NVIDIA tech demo, but it's still an improvement).
DukeN - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
I have one of these and I know it outperforms the GTX 280 but not sure what it'd be like against one of these puppies.dagamer34 - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
I need my bitstream Dolby Digital TrueHD/DTS HD Master Audio bistreaming codecs!!! :)ew915 - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
I don't see this beating the GT300 as for so it should beat the GTX295 by a great margin.tamalero - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
dood, you forgot the 295 is a DUAL CHIP?SiliconDoc - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
roflmao - Gee no more screaming the 4850x2 and the 4870x2 are best without pointing out the two gpu's needed to get there.--
Nonetheless, this 5870 is EPIC FAIL, no matter what - as we see the disappointing numbers - we all see them, and it's not good.
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Problem is, Nvidia has the MIMD multiple instructions breakthrough technology never used before that according to reports is an AWESOME advantage, lus they are moving to DDR5 with a 512 bit bus !
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So what is in the works is an absolute WHOMPING coming down on ati that BIG GREEN NVIDIA is going to deliver, and the poor numbers here from what was hoped for and hyped over (although even PREDICTED by the red fan Derek himself in one portion of one sorrowful and despressed sentence on this site) are just one step closer to that nail in the coffin...
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Yes I sure hope ati has something major up it's sleeve, like 512 bit mem bus increased card coming, the 5870Xmem ...
I find the speculation that ATI "mispredicted" the bandwidth needs to be utter non-sense. They are 2-3 billion in the hole from the last few years with "all these great cards" they still lose $ on every single sale, so they either cannot go higher bit width, or they don't want to, or they are hiding it for the next "strike at NVidia" release.
erple2 - Friday, September 25, 2009 - link
So you're comparing this product with a not yet release product and saying that the not yet released product is going to trounce it, without any facts to back it up? Do you have the hardware? If not, then you're simply ranting.Will the GT300 beat out the 5870? I dunno, probably. If it didn't, that would imply that the move from GT200 to GT300 was a major disappointment for NVidia.
I think that EPIC FAIL is completely ludicrous. I can see "epic fail" applied to the Geforce FX series when it came out. I can also see "epic fail" for the Radeon MAXX back in the day. But I don't see the 5870 as "epic fail". If you look at the card relative to the 4870 (the card it replaces), it's quite good - solid 30% increase. That's what I would expect from a generation improvement (that's what the gt200's did over the 9800's, and what the 8800 did over the 7900, etc).
BTW, I'm seeing the 5870 as pretty good - it beats out all single card NVidia by a reasonable and measureable amount. Sounds like ATI has done well. Or are you considering anything less than 2x the performance of the NVidia cards "epic fail"? In that case, you may be disappointed with the GT300, as well. In fact, I'll say that the GT300 is a total fail right now. I mean jeez! It scores ZERO FPS in every benchmark! That's super-epic fail. And I have the numbers to back that statement up.
Since you are making claims about the epic fail nature of the 5870 based on yet to be released hardware, I can certainly play the same game, and epic fail anything you say based on those speculative musings.
SiliconDoc - Monday, September 28, 2009 - link
Well the GT200 was 60.96% increase average. AT says so.http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3334...">http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3334...
So, I guess ati lost this round terribly, as NVidia's last just beat them by more than double your 30%.
Great, EPIC FAIL is correct, I was right, and well...
Finally - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
Team Green foames out of their mouthes. It's funny to watch.SiliconDoc - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
Glad you are having fun.Just let me know when you disagree, and why. I'm certain your fun will be "gone then", since reality will finally take hold, and instead of you seeing foam, I'll be seeing drool.