Radeon 5970 - Still fastest?

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Cronyx

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 24, 2005
Messages
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I''ve got an XFX 5970 2gb Black edition, was just wondering if that's still the fastest card.

Weird thing is though, for how much it costs, I still get stutter some times. Like in GTA4 or Eve Online after dropping out of warp, or looking in certain directions in the DC ruins area of Fallout 3.

Wonder if that's a sign I should upgrade to an SSD maybe. Can't imagine it's actually the card.
 
Weird thing is though, for how much it costs, I still get stutter some times. Like in GTA4 or Eve Online after dropping out of warp, or looking in certain directions in the DC ruins area of Fallout 3.
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It doesn't scale very well due to internal crossfire, and you didn't mention if you were running at Eyefinity resolutions with high AA, which Fallout struggles with. GTA requires more VRAM than probably any game out right now.
 
Cronyx said:
I''ve got an XFX 5970 2gb Black edition, was just wondering if that's still the fastest card.

Weird thing is though, for how much it costs, I still get stutter some times. Like in GTA4 or Eve Online after dropping out of warp, or looking in certain directions in the DC ruins area of Fallout 3.

Wonder if that's a sign I should upgrade to an SSD maybe. Can't imagine it's actually the card.
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It's still the fastest single graphics card. However, a new 6990 will be out by years end or early january that will be a bit faster. Not sure why your getting that stutter. The driver support on the 5800/5900 multi gpu is not the greatest. You may want to check if your utilizing both GPU's in those games. Many owners would simply disable internal crossfire x to get MORE performance on some games with some drivers. You may even find a older driver works better for one game and a newer driver works better for another.

The drivers are very inconsistent and I dont think there is much hope of AMD ever fixing it. In fact when they move on to the 6000 series I expect it to only get worse. They'll still support it but you'll need to do alot of testing with each new game to find what driver and multi or single gpu works best.

By the way, this seems to only be an issue with the 5850/5870 and 5970 (dual 5850) so it seems limited to 5800 GPU's the 5700/5600 cards scale fine. IF and that's a BIG IF the drivers are good on the new 6000 series I would sell your 5970 and get a 6990. It may be much better but we need to wait for revews to know for sure. There always is a chance of AMD breaking the good drivers later but it may be a much better scenario than your in right now.
 
I don't get any stutter on any of my games with my sapphire radeon 5970. I wonder if it's game specific?
 
Usually just 1920x1200, and I'll use however much AF/AA I can get away with before the framerate gets too bad.

What cards are faster? I know Southern Isles are coming out pretty soon, but for right now would 2x GTX, say, 470's or something be better?
 
Cronyx said:
Usually just 1920x1200, and I'll use however much AF/AA I can get away with before the framerate gets too bad.

What cards are faster? I know Southern Isles are coming out pretty soon, but for right now would 2x GTX, say, 470's or something be better?
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Stick with what you got, everything else would be a very minor improvement. The 6000 series is due out in days. The high end Cayman are due in a Months time. And the dual GPU antilles is due in 2 months or 2 months and some change.
 
how about some specs?
kinda hard to help when it sounds like HD thrashing, but you could have 20GB of ram, so who knows...
And yes, as of this writing, the 5970 is the fastest single card you can buy right now, but that could change in about a month(6970) or two(6990).
 
LeviathanZERO said:
how about some specs?
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<<< CPU >>>
Intel Core i7-950 Bloomfield 3.06GHz LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core

<<< GPU >>>
XFX Radeon HD 5970 Black Edition

<<< RAM >>>
CORSAIR DOMINATOR-GT 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 2000 (PC3 16000)

<<< PSU >>>
Enermax Galaxy EVO 1250W

<<< MOTHERBOARD >>>
EVGA e762 X58 Classified 4-Way SLI

When I built it back in like... March? April? There abouts, at least, a faster computer could hardly be built without breaking the 3k barrier.

The only thing I haven't done yet, like I said, is SSD for boot drive.
 
I'd say it's still the fastest single card right now. At least most of the time. Though the fact that it relies somewhat on Crossfire is it's Achilles Heel. However, with that said I haven't had any issues with it. Then again I'm not running Eyefinity. That's where the card seems to struggle the most.
 
The 6990 is the rumored product name name for Antilles, which is rumored to be two Cayman GPUs in crossfire, just like Hemlock is two Cypress GPUs. Unless that information is wrong, the 6990 will rely on crossfire just as much as the 5970. Of course this problem is only as bad as AMD's drivers... which might improve someday. Who knows! Also, maybe Antilles will see the return of RV770's "sideport" feature and perhaps that will improve scaling. Time will tell.
 
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What about the ASUS ares card (2x 5870) or the mythical 2x GTX 480 one? They are stupid expensive however...
 
Does nVidia have a "two chips on one PCB via SLI" style card like it or did they never go down that road?
 
Yes nVidia has been making those cards for a while now: the 7950GX2, the 9800GX2, and the GTX295.

We have yet to see a dual-GPU product based on the Fermi architecture. GF100 is too power hungry, but GF104 might be a suitable candidate for it.
 
Cronyx said:
Does nVidia have a "two chips on one PCB via SLI" style card like it or did they never go down that road?
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I know they had the 9800 GX2, not sure if the GTX 295 was 2 gpus on one card. There was rumors of the dual fermi that was supposed to called GTX 490. It would do nvsurround on a single card. But i haven't seen anything when it will release.
 
A 280 needed 236w. A 480 needs 250w (only 14w more) but PCIe specifications only allow for 300w

There is a galaxy 480 with a 240 physx coprocessor (i'm not sure if it is released or was ever released) and the Asus dual 470/480 board.
 
I have little doubt that Cayman (HD6970) will match or surpass the GTX 480 in performance given how much perf/mm2 we're seeing from Barts (HD6870). I wouldn't be surprised if Antilles (HD6990) is quite a bit faster than either a HD5970 or a dual GF104 card.

I just don't see Nvidia taking the single-card performance crown back until Kepler next year.
 
How do you guys know which cards the companies are making /next year/, e.g. Kepler? And how do you predict the performance of those cards? Just applying the law of accelerating returns to them or similar?
 
I remember shopping for video cards back when the 7950GX2 was the high end, but I held off on it because of multi GPU issues and bought an 8800 about a month later. That 8800 took me all the way to late 2009 and when I went looking at video cards again I thought that they would have figured out multi GPU by now, but amazingly its all the same issues.

I wonder if we will ever see a day when multi GPU works just as well as single.
 
Still the fastest card unless there is a crossfire breaking bug like in Fallout New Vegas :mad:

The real kicker is that the card is massively under clocked, so if you have a good PSU and are willing to overclock and overvolt you can way more power out of the card, it will run at the speed of 2 over clocked 5870s in crossfire, for most people. The card was designed specifically for overclocking.

Unless they break the 300W PCI-E specifications with the 6990 or whatever the new dual GPU variant will be, I doubt stock performance will be any different to the 5970, although it may have higher overclocking headroom.

It's truly a beast of a card, I personally think they should have broken the 300W power limit and gone for a proper full speed dual 5870 part and wired in some heftier connections like 2x8pin PCI-E connectors so we're not straining our PSUs overclocking this bad boy :)
 
Overclocking yields the most performance increase over any video card I can recall having previously. Then again we are talking about going from 5850 to 5870 clocks. That's a fair difference as it is.
 
Remember when moving to new areas, especially graphically intense ones, the card has to pull data from the hard drive. I reduced most (if not all) of my stuttering issues when I upgraded to an SSD... Fallout and Oblivion especially.
 
Arcygenical said:
Remember when moving to new areas, especially graphically intense ones, the card has to pull data from the hard drive. I reduced most (if not all) of my stuttering issues when I upgraded to an SSD... Fallout and Oblivion especially.
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Yup. And Wow just loves a SSD.
 
Dan_D said:
Overclocking yields the most performance increase over any video card I can recall having previously. Then again we are talking about going from 5850 to 5870 clocks. That's a fair difference as it is.
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Yeah well it ships with the same hardware inside 5870 cards, so we know the hardware is rated to 850MHz GPU and 4800Mhz Memory (actually I think the memory is rated for 5Ghz?)

But you don't have to stop at 5870 speeds, you can actually go a fair bit further than that with a good PSU you can push the speeds almost as fast as a regular 5870 will overclock, even on air, on water I bet it would clock no different from a pair of 5870 in crossfire...

I currently run mine at 5870 speeds, that's a trivial overclock, just put the Vcore up a bit and dump the sliders on 850/1100 and jobs a goodun.

*edit*

so clocks can go from 725MHz to 1GHz (ish), and 4GHz to 5GHz, percentage wise, that's huge.
 
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