AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5870 Video Card Review @ [H]

Negative, though I have floated the idea of adding in some compute applications for testing. It is something I'm thinking about, but need to find the right implementation and representation of the data, and usefulness of it. I am looking into it.
 
uhmm. very close to my 280SLI numbers, but with a single card ad eyefinity.

Man, tempting, but I hope I ca resist and wait for the 5870x2.

Well done [H[ard|ocp
 
Sounds great! The only thing is I don't know why you're making it seem like this card offers more performance for the price over the HD4890.

I got a 4890 a few weeks ago for $200 Canadian - that's half or less than what the 5870 costs and the 5870 is close to twice as fast only at very high resolutions and with AA on. At anything lower (and honestly, even enthusiasts don't all have 30 inch screens, most would rather get two 24" ones since they're cheap), it's just a bit faster, so I would argue that the 4890 is a much better value for your money.

I remember buying $500 video cards that didn't run all my new games at high resolutions with AA/AF on...Then two years ago I got that at $300 (8800GT) and now at just $200.

I look forward to seeing what the second-fastest card from AMD will be like.
 
After reading the review, i'm no longer in a hurry to get a 5870 at this price point... i kinda was hoping that this was the Crysis card, but not even 30fps with 2xAA Enthusiast turns me off :(
I ll wait for nVidia's answer, and decide then

Awesome article btw
 
Thanks for the great write-up. Now to decide on 1 of these or if and when nvidia comes out with something. With the multimonitor setup on ATI, does anyone know if that enables say 1 monitor to display a fullscreen movie while the other playing a fullscreen videogame? If ATI can do this I AM SOLD!

Oh I forgot to add, zipzoomfly currently has stock on the HIS 5870
http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=10011217
Newegg just sold out as I was writing this
 
any benefits with the XFX cards? there is a good $30 extra that i'd have to fork out
 
Great review Brent/Kyle.

Could you guys comment on how the noise level compares to a gtx 275/285 at load? Anandtech's review seems to show the 5870 being about 13db louder than the 275, or pretty much the same as the 285. Is there typically that big a difference in noise between the 275/285? I was under the impression they used the same cooler. Using a 275 right now and its pretty quiet, even at load.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3643&p=26
 
Great review Brent/Kyle.

Could you guys comment on how the noise level compares to a gtx 275/285 at load? Anandtech's review seems to show the 5870 being about 13db louder than the 275, or pretty much the same as the 285. Is there typically that big a difference in noise between the 275/285? I was under the impression they used the same cooler. Using a 275 right now and its pretty quiet, even at load.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3643&p=26

Noise is mentioned bottom page 12, I don't have decibel readings.
 
What do you all think about the AF IQ and addition of Supersampling AA? Like/Dislike/Don't Care? Give me your opinions.
 
Negative, though I have floated the idea of adding in some compute applications for testing. It is something I'm thinking about, but need to find the right implementation and representation of the data, and usefulness of it. I am looking into it.
Head over to the DC forum. Myself and other members have offered to help [H] come up with some F@H-related testing methodology several times before. All you have to do is take us up on the offer.
What do you all think about the AF IQ and addition of Supersampling AA? Like/Dislike/Don't Care? Give me your opinions.
AF is one of the biggest factors of image quality to me, so I think these improvements are awesome. I'm ambivalent about the SSAA. It was always an inefficient way of removing aliasing, and its performance impact and overall IQ reduction don't make it a very attractive solution. It's nice that they added the option, but I don't see it getting much use.
 
Truly amazing review i'm speechless !!! so deep and detailed great job guys!

The card is impressive even someone say the fps is kinda low in Crysis i think its good!
being 10 % slower then GTX295 is nowhere near weak for 100$ less and free from scaling issues! Also i already order 2 of this so the performance in Crysis won't be issue for me :cool: Oh and i already forgot the Arma II numbers are amazing also!

Now i just hope the apdate of the review for 5870 in crossfire will come soon enough ;)

Can't wait to get my hands on this babies!
 
Truly amazing review i'm speechless !!! so deep and detailed great job guys!

The card is impressive even someone say the fps is kinda low in Crysis i think its good!
being 10 % slower then GTX295 is nowhere near weak for 100$ less and free from scaling issues! Also i already order 2 of this so the performance in Crysis won't be issue for me :cool: Oh and i already forgot the Arma II numbers are amazing also!

Now i just hope the apdate of the review for 5870 in crossfire will come soon enough ;)

Can't wait to get my hands on this babies!

+1

Got two here too. Cross your fingers and hope they ship out fast and they don't get backordered, I'm afraid of that for mine.

Overnight Shipping ftw!
 
Thanks for the review :)

Things I learned:
ARMAII is not badly coded, just computional heavy.
AMD dosn't consider Havok to be propriatary :)confused::confused::confused:)
The performance is great, but not as good as the leaked info would lead you to belive.
Lots of features (like always with an ATI card), but nothing currently uses those features (like always with an ATI card)...so time will tell if this will be just as always.
This is a refresh of the R700 architechture, looking forward to seeing it go against a new architecture later this year.

And I am looking forward to seeing DX11 DIRT2 clash head with DX9/PhysX NFS- Shift.
 
Great review as always guys :)

I have to say though that I was expecting just a little bit more out of the card.

Guess I'll be hanging onto my gtx295 until I see the x2 or gt300 (or ati releases some magic drivers :p).
 
great review guys, I also looked at the anandtech review, from looking at that I do think that after this gen ati better go 512bit on the memory bus otherwise they will make a great mistake, because in AT review the gtx 295 started to match or beat its performance by a little at 2560 resolution, while at 1920x1200 it was performing like a champ and coming out on top in most of the games, which is perfect for me because I have a 24inch monitor, and also the card should be fine until next gen, but next gen better have 512bit memory bus otherwise amd will be cutting their own feet off, I do think though it will happen amd is probably just trying to stay at the same power envelope, and with the next shrink it would definitely be possible. I just hope they don't just depend on the speed of gddr5, because it won't do any good when you got so much horsepower under the hood and you are limiting it by memory bus
 
Enjoyed the review and I liked hearing the game devs have had HD5870s to code DX11 on since June. :)
 
I'm much looking forward to the forthcoming 5850 and 5770 reviews.
Gaming at 1920x1080 at max settings is my goal so these new cards are very promising.
Thanks for the excellent reviews as usual.
 
Looking forward to the other reviews comign this week on this series. As usual AMD is first out the gate with good new tech but no software to help utilze it along has happend a couple times in AMD history its unfortunate nvidia, intel have the pockets to hold things back at there desired pace.
 
great review guys, I also looked at the anandtech review, from looking at that I do think that after this gen ati better go 512bit on the memory bus otherwise they will make a great mistake, because in AT review the gtx 295 started to match or beat its performance by a little at 2560 resolution, while at 1920x1200 it was performing like a champ and coming out on top in most of the games, which is perfect for me because I have a 24inch monitor, and also the card should be fine until next gen, but next gen better have 512bit memory bus otherwise amd will be cutting their own feet off, I do think though it will happen amd is probably just trying to stay at the same power envelope, and with the next shrink it would definitely be possible. I just hope they don't just depend on the speed of gddr5, because it won't do any good when you got so much horsepower under the hood and you are limiting it by memory bus

That really doesn't matter though, as long as they can keep pumping up high amounts of GDDR5 frequency, they can gain memory bandwidth as they have done with the HD 5870. The HD 4870 has 115.2GB/sec of bandwidth with 3.6GHz GDDR5. The HD 5870 has 153.6GB/sec of bandwidth with 4.8GHz GDDR5. The GTX 295 does not have a 512-bit memory bus, it has a 448-bit memory bus. The memory bandwidth with the 448-bit memory bus and GDDR3 is 112GB/sec. Therefore, HD 5870 clearly has much higher memory bandwidth.
 
What do you all think about the AF IQ and addition of Supersampling AA? Like/Dislike/Don't Care? Give me your opinions.
I know a few posters @ Rage3D use it for WoW with nVidia cards. Might help them in deciding what card when upgrading. I don't use it, but nice of AMD to give the user the choice. :)

P.S. I was referring to Supersampling not AF. Love that AMD has raised the bar on AF.
 
The GTX 295 does not have a 512-bit memory bus, it has a 448-bit memory bus. The memory bandwidth with the 448-bit memory bus and GDDR3 is 112GB/sec. Therefore, HD 5870 clearly has much higher memory bandwidth.

+1
I'm sure they have there reasons for not switching to a different bus. As long as they keep there cost/performance level where it's at who cares how?
 
Enjoyed the review and I liked hearing the game devs have had HD5870s to code DX11 on since June. :)

I also found this pleasantly surprising, good to know they have been in devs hands since early Summer already. In order for DX11 to take off the cards have to be there, and getting them in their hands as quickly as possible means DX11 games will be here that much sooner, hopefully.
 
i should not read the review, i think my 4890 is doing okay, but if i read the review i know it would give me a reason to sell my current rig and get a new vid card..lol
 
Looking forward to the other reviews comign this week on this series. As usual AMD is first out the gate with good new tech but no software to help utilze it along has happend a couple times in AMD history its unfortunate nvidia, intel have the pockets to hold things back at there desired pace.

Unfortunately, holding things back means game developers don't have anything to work with in terms of new feature support in hardware which in turn means games using these features take longer to develop and be released.

In this case, it helps to have the chicken before the egg.
 
What do you all think about the AF IQ and addition of Supersampling AA? Like/Dislike/Don't Care? Give me your opinions.

The Ghostbusters pictures for 4X and 8X looked better, more natural, to me with Supersampling on. With just 4X and 8X AA, they looked more "cartoonie" to me. If I had the card, I suspect I'd be using it.
 
What do you all think about the AF IQ and addition of Supersampling AA? Like/Dislike/Don't Care? Give me your opinions.

Like Anand's review said, there is no visual difference between AMD's old and new AF ingame so...
Supersampling AA looks great though...when they get the bugs ironed out ;)
 
I have mumblings:

Brent... no you may not click a red arrow to see where he said it said:
One interesting result of enabling EDC however is that overclocking consequences have now changed. In the past, when you overclocked memory on a video card it would ramp up in frequency until the video card would start throwing out artifacts, and then crash. Now when you overclock memory frequency your performance will increase until it reaches its climax and EDC kicks in fixing errors in the memory due to the frequency being too high. This means EDC will fix these problems and your performance will start to actually degrade as you increase frequency and EDC has to work harder at fixing the errors. There won’t be as much flashing polygons and artifacts anymore and no outright crashing from overclocking memory, you will only see a performance decline. Therefore, the goal is to now overclock memory until performance starts declining, then back it off until you’ve reached the point right before the decline, and that is your maximum stable memory overclock."

soo desu ka!? This is some kind of parity system?

that makes things a tad difficult... How exactly did you guys raise the memory frequency? My usual setup is rivatuner + atiTool or furmark (both of which have FPS readouts, I guess all you do is pay attention to that?) Anyone want to make bets as to how long until we see multiple people posting 6GHz+ memory setups for 20fps- performance?

Anyways, it was a good article and it seems like the trend fits the rumors perfectly. Although, strangely, it looks to me like this card did ample better than ATI's own useless by percentage-and-not-scaled-properly chart...

Considering what a modern $100 card offers in todays games (short of crysis), those benchmarks wern't really too helpful, aside from giving a relativistic trend. I think what everybody wants to see is how the Bioshock 2's are going to perform.

The other interesting thing to me is that it sounds like the relationship between Nvidias TWIMTBP developer program and ATI's developer programs are starting to heat up. ATI [URL="http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15593/1/%22]supposidly shelled out $1,000,000 to a dev[/URL] to incorporate DX11 API calls into their game...
 
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That really doesn't matter though, as long as they can keep pumping up high amounts of GDDR5 frequency, they can gain memory bandwidth as they have done with the HD 5870. The HD 4870 has 115.2GB/sec of bandwidth with 3.6GHz GDDR5. The HD 5870 has 153.6GB/sec of bandwidth with 4.8GHz GDDR5. The GTX 295 does not have a 512-bit memory bus, it has a 448-bit memory bus. The memory bandwidth with the 448-bit memory bus and GDDR3 is 112GB/sec. Therefore, HD 5870 clearly has much higher memory bandwidth.

very true, but I wasn't just talking about the memory bandwidth I was talking about the memory bus in general I am sure you can clock the memory high and have the same bandwidth but wouldn't it be more sufficient to have a wider memory bus, I bet we could test it where you have 512bit bus with gddr5 for instance take the unreleased gt300, and downclocked it to match the bandwidth of 5870 with 256bit bus and see what the results are, I am sure the card with wider bus would be more sufficient, though it looks good for games right now but what my point was lets say they move to 28nm and have 3200sp's and doubled everything, do you not think they would be limiting it with the memory bus with only 256bit, I am not trying to argue here as I will probably get this card or the 5850 which is priced really nice at 259, but I wouldn't wanna see the card with a 256bit bus and double the shader count, rop's and texture units.
 
I wish we had dx11 game that used the hardware in a good manner, and see how it performs.
 
they did have apples to apples on the bottom of every page
 
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