Hardware ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB Review

Alas, with the driver we had nothing would pick up the temps of the GPU. We'll re-visit the testing sometime soon to see though.

The driver didn't support F@H either, again, we'll see what the public-release driver can offer once we've cleared some of the other work we've got piled up.

 

Yep, agreed that it's annoying and misleading. But then again, the card does actually have all that memory, and companies have to use every trick they can to make people buy their products...

 

Seen a few more reviews you need an overclocked i7 920 to get even close to max performance to me it just
strikes as enthusast product. So back to real world ammount of people who own a set up were you actually gain out is wat 10?

Need big screen moniter 25 inch really + water cooling set up for rest of pc

if I ever upgrade above the HD resolution ( or games start to suffer) maybe i'd upgrade

 

Nice to see that power consumption, especially idle, is relatively low.

 

AFAIK, it's not using SSAA unless it's forced in the driver control panel. The hit is quite significant (much more significant than we've shown) and so it's not doing 'extra' work in that sense. I'm waiting for ATI to confirm the trilinear filtering algorithms it's using, but from what I saw in the filtering tests I ran, it looked like adaptive filtering wasn't running. Angle independent AF is something that's definitely there though and that's a definite quality improvement.

 

any water blocks announced for this bad boy yet???

 

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO !

so its either vapor-x or some 3-rd party cooler.

 

Well been playing around with these for the last 5 hours. I ended up with two 5870 sapphires and they are massive lol i thought my old 8800gtx's were huge but these just about fit in my case I have about a fingers width between the back of the cards and the back of a 120mm case fan (my case isn't exactly small its a Mozart TX). If you are going to get these make 100% sure you have enough room for them or there is no way they will fit give at least another 2 inches minimum, on top of the actual width of the card.

So far I've played around with them at stock with my 920 i7 at 4.0ghz which is attainable by anyone with a decent board, Windows 7 rc, gfx cards at stock clocks. My first run of 3dmark vantage I managed to get the following see image below:
http://i33.tinypic.com/iwmdls.jpg

I wanted to bench crysis but EADM has problems so I can't even launch the game at the moment!!.

With Batman Arkham Asylum at 1920x1200 every thing maxed out ran the bench mark and got the following:

minimum =129
Maximum = 398
Average = 275

Counter Strike Source 1920x1200 every thing maxed out full AA and AF etc:

Maximum = 301
Minimum = 265fps
Average was 270 ( take this with a pinch of salt though and +/- 5fps)

Street fighter 4 benchmark 1920x1200 everything maxed out

Minimum = 265.85
Maximum = 306.10
Average 269.81

That's all I have had a chance to do so far but I'll do a few more in a few hours time just need to find where I put half of my gaming CD's moving house is a nightmare

 

One thing I forgot to say is that from my early impressions the drivers are definitely holding this card back and that's why some of the benchmarks look disappointing to people. I can tell that once they have got the drivers tweaked and working properly you should see a increase in performance.

 

Also just noticed 3dmark reporting my cards as 5850 not sure why.

 

GTA IV @ 1920x1200 everything set to max apart from shadows which was set to high.

Minimum = 52
Maximum = 82
Average = 64

 

5870

Interesting review, I feel I am part of a wider community here, is it me or have we all been waiting patiently for a new GPU?( I own the ageing HD2900 xt )

Remember when ATI brought out the 2000 series? In the hope of capturing the DX10 market? We all jumped on the bandwagon, and snapped them up, and we were punished most severely. The HD2000 series could not cope with DX10 amid all the hype, I upgraded for Cysis !!!!.

Remember that the 5000 series is supposed to be for the DX11 era, forget previous DX9 DX 10/10.1.

I personally will wait this one out purely from past experience, as I have a sneak suspicion that the 5000 series will render previous DX fine but fall short when dx11 hits the streets
( Aliens v Predator is DX11),. I suspect Nvidia are waiting on this very scenario, and come 2010 DX 11 will be firmly in Nvidia's hands.

I hope I'm wrong!

I have mixed feelings with regards to the test, I feel a true benchmark test would have been
!!Crysis on Very High settings!!

Articles like this often make me wonder... Just what the HELL were the developers testing Crysis on when it first came out? 8x 8800 GTX and fifty quad cpu's? I mean surely they maxXXed it out before release with a solid minimum frame rate? ( I suspect they sent over to NASA... it's a royal con! )

Interesting.. However going off the review and where I am now, I must admit I feel that a 5850 or 5870 would be great for me, simply because I do not have a HUUAAGGEE monitor ( 22 inch 1680 by 1050 ) so I have no Hi def ( damn ) I am also concerned about physX, as we all know Nvidia acquired Ageia some time ago, interestingly Nvidia cards also run Havoc!, so does it makes sense to go with Nvidia? I mean the GTX 300 will support dx11,physX and Havoc.

However with tessellation and stream capability I am unsure. I will be holding off until the new year, and fighting temptation furiously! ( I owe the missus 600 squid!!!) it's also funny how console owners still try and compete with us PC owners, I mean the GPU card alone costs more that a console!!! no contest.

The future for PC gaming is bright, let's keep it alive!!

sNake.

 

Some good points there....

i'm a Nvidia fan and really am on the fence with this new card.
Sit and wait to see what happens is the plan.

 

If you don't need the card yet don't buy it you would probably see more value waiting until next year. If you want to up grade now because you want the best thing out these cards are worth every penny the drivers at the moment are holding them back but performance should improve and will be by a noticeable margin when they get tweaked.

 

Finally got crysis working and my min was 47 fps, average was 49fps which to be fair is not bad at all with Very high settings across the board, 4 x AA and at 1920x1200.

 

Wow, that's quite impressive. My 2GB GTX 285 can't pull that off. What are your view/detail distances set at?

 

i think my 4890 will last me till the refresh card for the 5870 arrives

 

@macdelorean

The view distance is set to 39

This is the highest i can set it to without going over the memory limits or without reducing other effects such as shadows etc. I'll tweak things later on today to see what settings give the best performance and IQ. On another note Asus have managed to get out a 38% performance increase just by OC'ing the standard 5870 now I am damn happy I got these I just need to wait for the update GPUtool or flash my cards with the Asus bios and use their tweaking tool.

 

On another note I will be selling my two week old XFX4890's for deffo now give me a shout if any one is interested.

 

I'm surprised there's no benchmarks for Folding@home. I've looked around, nobody posted Folding@home for the HD 5870.