Hardware AMD ATI Radeon HD 5970 Review

Lets not forget, DX11 performance is still an unknown - no DX11 games, so unless you need a card now, it might be more sensible to wait. Personally, I can already play all of the games I have at maximum settings with a £160 card.

 

Fixed

(srysly - hurry up and get mine in the post!!!)

 

If Charlie Damarajin's information about Fermi is accurate, it's not going to be anything to write home about. While he's, at best, an... infamous... source of information, his reporting on Nvidia's production issues have been spot on, and those statements arrived months before anyone else said it. At least in this case, he has some shred of credibility.

According to semiaccurate, Nvidia missed their clock targets by 18%. Ouch.

 

this reminds me of when the 280 and 260 came out costing A LOT and then suddenly ATI came out with cheaper better cards and forced nvidia to lower prices. I hope nvidia releases their cards soon and forces a price drop on the ATI cards...

Won't buy DX11 cards til the full pack of cards comes out. Come on nVidia hurry up already

 

To be honest, with the amount of miss-information and rumours that surround the Graphics card market I am going to wait until we see firm specs / previews from the big hitting sites before making any firm decisions on whether Fermi is any good or not. Hopefully it will turn out to be pretty good.

 

But remember, Fermi has the advantage of a single GPU config, so is not reliant on multi-GPU drivers. The GTX 295 also was significantly weaker in TFLOP performance than the 4870 X2, but still beat it in FPS. Different architectures, and dare I say it Nvidia's better driver support, mean this battle has a long way to go. Now if that Lucid Hydra thingymabob(*), were adopted by ATI in place of Crossfire, that could be a tasty slice of silicon.

(*) - If it works

 

I was merely stating your review does stand out, on the value for money point..

<sarcasm>To be honest the last graphics card I purchased which represented good value for money was a Trident 9000 256k, which was a very long time ago.</sarcasm>

If you put the card up against its brethren say in between 2x 5850's and 2x5870's it does land in the right price and performance point.

 

Hmm, like one of you guys wrote - value is value, and performance is performance. Meaning, that they are separate metrics that don't depend on each other. Therefore, by this same logic, this card should get a 10 for performance, seeing as it's the fastest thing on the planet currently.
Also, what's up with testing a card like 5970 on just high settings with Crysis?

I am also thinking, that even though Stalker is very intense, if you take a card like 5970 and do not go for max settings, you are kind of missing the point with this card. It's not a mainstream contender

One another - as this card will hadly go into the hands of people, who do not overclock their processors, I would imagine testing with a OC-d Core i7 would yeild better results.

Overall, disappointed in your review - very superficial and done without considering what this card is meant for. Got me thinking it was similar if someone would test a Veyron and would focus on it's fuel consumption in the city.

 

Poor driver - this is discussed in the article!

Note the 'if' there...

 

I agree about the crysis on high settings bit because it would've been nice to see how it performs at ultra high but tbh I couldn't care less.

As for the OC they used to have their i7 at 4GHz~ (I think) I'm not sure why they changed it but if they use an overclocked i7 for one article then they have to do it for everything otherwise it wouldn't be fair and by doing that for every card could be misleading for lower end card reviews because you can end up having your CPU carry your GPU and people wouldn't get the product they wanted, I personally prefer a stock clocked CPU for GPU reviews because I want to see how a GPU could perform in realistic instances and not when they've got a 4GHz CPU behind them. Not everyone can afford to overclock the crap out of their CPU incase of failure or just plain power consumption

 

Piss poor drivers and optimisation for Call of Duty World at War in crossfire mode.

ATi should of sorted this out a long time ago.

 

No comparison with 5870 CrossFire? And apart from poor CoD5 benchmarks, the card is way up there, performance ought to be 9/10 -- it's relative to current offerings and as such it's one of the/if not the fastest single-PCB card around.

 

I really hate to be an obsessive nag, and great review overall as always. But Crysis Very High results are still missing. If you only wanted to run one set of tests I think Very High would have been the better choice. We're talking a $600 piece of hardware are we not? The fastest consumer graphics card in the world? I know if I buy a 5970 I'm not going to be looking to run Crysis on High. Just MHO.

I guess I'll just try to extrapolate the Very High Crysis performance from the High. Again, sorry for being a nag but I feel Crysis Very High results were an excellent addition to the benchmarks and I'm disappointed at their omission in the most recent reviews.

 

no eyefinity test results? while it isn't hard to see the trends, it would be nice to see some actual numbers. After all, huge resolution gaming means even console ports have a home on pc =)

Im guessing due to supply of 5870's and 5850's its unlikely to see some crossfire numbers from bit-tech?

 

Harry is working on some CrossFire performance on the 5850/5870

 

Looking at the benchmarks again, this card is nothing short of putrid. I guess people looking for a DX11 card better than the 5870 will have to wait until a vague "Q1 2010" for Fermi to get something worth the money. That could mean March for all we know.

Ugh. It's probably the drivers and not the hardware itself, but this is in "holy crap I can't believe they actually released this" territory. This falls well under the low end of my expectations for the 5970.

 

Still no GPU to play Crysis maxed out at 1080p resolution with minimum 60fps, so that I can turn on vsync in the game. But maybe a few driver updates is all the 5970 needs to do it.

 

Hands up, I'm guilty of skimming through. I'll read through it properly later, honest!

*feels like teech asked him a question and he gave a silly answer*

 

you wont run this card on 32 bit operating system for anyone wondering about memory issues.

£500 for a card? ? is just lol

5870 is even hard to say its value for money. 5850 feels like a decent ground. ( personaly id buy whatever is in stock of the 2)

These duel gpus and crossfire sli realiance. Doesnt seem alot of point to me. How many games get crossfire + sli support outta the box that actually works.

3 30inch moniters? Are we on planet earth of planet lupo lol . didnt a poll show most pc gamers are on a 21inch moniter. So how the hell is amd expecting people to own 3 30inch moniters.