First Good Review of ATI Radeon HD 5870

Doomsday

Doomsday

Tech Junkie
Cool! The most powerful Single GPU solution! Any news when Nvidia is coming up with the GT300 series?!?
 
B

Bongr

Obliviot
Looks like a really nice card but it doesn't seem like a massive improvement over the nvidia cards like the GTX285.
 
gibbersome

gibbersome

Coastermaker
Doomsday said:
Cool! The most powerful Single GPU solution! Any news when Nvidia is coming up with the GT300 series?!?
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I think we can expect Nvidia 300 series Q4 2009 - Q1 2010. A quick search on Google didn't reveal any dates set in stone for the Nvidia.

Nvidia is in a tough position though. The biggest selling point for the 5870 is that it supports DirectX11. In terms of performance, the 4850, 4870, GTX 285 work just fine for the latest generation of games out now. The longer Nvidia waits, the more marketshare 5870 will grab and the GTX 300 series will have to do something really special for people to shell out extra money for it.

Also remember that Nvidia's cards almost always debut at a much higher premium than ATI's cards do. The 5870 might be sub-$300 by the time the GTX 380 is revealed, one other thing working against Nvidia.



Anyway to keep things balanced, here's one of the more intriguing criticisms of the 5870 I saw on dailytech:

chizow said:
GPU technology is shockingly parallel and as a result the formula for GPU success is quite simple and has been for years:

1) Take what works from your previous designs.
2) Double it.
3) Shrink it.

The end result in the past has been near linear scaling provided you keep other factors similar, like clockspeeds. Except this isn't the case with the 5870, in fact, it scales worst than the 4870X2, which can at least claim multi-GPU scaling inefficiencies as an excuse.

As for what Nvidia has in store, sure, I'll take that bet. Based on the same leaked sources that leaked the 5870's specs and the obvious realization these parts aren't "developed in 24 hours", Nvidia's GT300 should beat the GTX 295. Its specs are actually closer to a full doubling of the GTX 285, rather than a GTX 275 x 2 as is the case with the 295.
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Chizow is right in the sense that there's nothing revolutionary about the 5870's hardware. Do you guys agree or disagree?
 
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gibbersome

gibbersome

Coastermaker
Xbit labs has a pros and cons list. As you can tell, they didn't find much wrong with the card. :)

Highs:

* The highest performance among single-processor graphics cards;
* In most cases outperforms Radeon HD 4870;
* In some cases outperforms GeForce GTX 295;
* Doesn’t depend on software multi-GPU support
* Wide range of supported FSAA modes;
* Best Edge-detect CFAA in the industry;
* Best anisotropic filtering in the industry;
* Supports up to three monitors;
* 1024 MB of fast GDDR5 local video memory onboard;
* 1600 ALU, 80 texture processors and 32 raster processors;
* DirectX 11, Shader Model 5.0 and DirectCompute 11 support;
* Fully-fledged hardware HD video decoding;
* High-quality HD video post-processing with scalability;
* Integrated sound core with HD support;
* Sound over HDMI;
* Low power consumption;
* Low noise.

Lows:

* Large size.
 
Kougar

Kougar

Techgage Staff
Staff member
Going by general news floating about, I'd say NVIDIA will show up around Q1 2009, unless the news about TSMC's 40nm yields has been plain wrong. They will probably want to refine their cards too now that ATI's launched before they did... it's been awhile since that occurred.

I'd disagree with Chizow in that GPU's are just faster versions of themselves. Everything changed with DX10, everything got moved from separate pipelines into shaders instead, and later general computing is becoming a hit. I rather like Anandtech's article because if you read it, you'll see just how new and improved the 5870 is... it is much more self-aware, almost like Nehalem being "self-aware" thanks to it's PCU. I'd be particular interested to see the Angle-Independent Anisotropic Filtering, because shimmering and other AF artifacts have always been an issue for me and NVIDIA cards...
 
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gibbersome

gibbersome

Coastermaker
sqrl said:
What's the price tag for this?
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Yep, what Quite_Little said.

But there should be deals to be had this holiday season so if you're not in a hurry, I'd say wait. There will be deals posted in the Tech Deals section once they're out.

There are certain companies like Asus that have come up with their own overclocked version of the 5870. They offer a nice performance boost (38% in Asus's case) so it really depends on what you're looking for.
 
Kougar

Kougar

Techgage Staff
Staff member
The 5850 will probably be the better card to get, shouldn't be much of a performance loss but at a much lower price ($259). Of course the midrange models will be even more affordable, and should still offer 4870 or better performance when they launch early next year...
 
gibbersome

gibbersome

Coastermaker
Kougar said:
The 5850 will probably be the better card to get, shouldn't be much of a performance loss but at a much lower price ($259). Of course the midrange models will be even more affordable, and should still offer 4870 or better performance when they launch early next year...
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According to ATI, the 5850 will have about 80% of the performance of the 5870. This should easily beat the performance of the 4870.
 
Kougar

Kougar

Techgage Staff
Staff member
gibbersome said:
According to ATI, the 5850 will have about 80% of the performance of the 5870. This should easily beat the performance of the 4870.
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I don't consider the 5850 to be midrange.... I was referring to the 5770 / 5750 cards. :)
 
Doomsday

Doomsday

Tech Junkie
Kougar <script type="text/javascript"> vbmenu_register("postmenu_33506", true); </script>
Staff Writer

What happened to the Tech Monkey?! lol!
 
Kougar

Kougar

Techgage Staff
Staff member
Doomsday said:
Kougar <script type="text/javascript"> vbmenu_register("postmenu_33506", true); </script>
Staff Writer

What happened to the Tech Monkey?! lol!
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You know what they say about putting enough tech monkeys together with keyboards... they'll eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare , or something equally impressive supposedly. :p
 
gibbersome

gibbersome

Coastermaker
Kougar said:
I don't consider the 5850 to be midrange.... I was referring to the 5770 / 5750 cards. :)
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Lol, oops. Well once the X2's and the 5890's come out, and when the price of the 5850 drops to below $200...maybe then? :)

Kougar said:
You know what they say about putting enough tech monkeys together with keyboards... they'll eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare , or something equally impressive supposedly. :p
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Have you heard about the library at the tower of Babylon? The library is so tall it stretches up into the clouds and houses every book ever written, being written and will be written. Also houses every book that consists of any combination of letters, words, in every variety of language (several authored by Shakespeare-aspiring monkeys).

There is a librarian who searches endlessly through the stacks looking for the most important book. The book which is the index of every other book in the library.

Boggles your mind doesn't it.
 
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