ATi 5850/5870 review thread

[error8]

Originally posted by: MegaWorks
The memory bandwidth is what's killing this card potential, I mean cmon 153.6GB/sec with 1600 stream processors!!!!!!

I have the same impression. It doesn't seem to be enough. We'll see about that once somebody starts doing some serious testing and memory overclocking.

 

[bryanW1995]

CURSE YOU MICHAEL DELL!!! (shakes fist)

This whole dell/paper launch strategy sucks for ati but is good for amd overally. They are now in a much stronger negotiating position with dell, plus they just made their #1 customer VERY happy. How many alienware computers with the win7 launch will be sold just because nobody can get a 5870?

 

[mb]

If I was still on a 8800GT I would jump on this card right away, but I think I'll hold out for a 5890.

 

[v8envy]

Originally posted by: bryanW1995
CURSE YOU MICHAEL DELL!!! (shakes fist)

This whole dell/paper launch strategy sucks for ati but is good for amd overally. They are now in a much stronger negotiating position with dell, plus they just made their #1 customer VERY happy. How many alienware computers with the win7 launch will be sold just because nobody can get a 5870?

Problem is, the high end Alienwares are packing i7s. Sure, it makes Dell happy. But will it translate to $ for AMD?

While we can't be privy to the shady boardroom dealings I see this as a missed opportunity to deliver the "bundles" AMD thought would offer a better value proposition when compared to the new i5/i7s. As in, 5870 + motherboard + AMD cpu = availability + discount. The epeen set would still buy the bundle just to get the latest and greatest card.

 

[bunnyfubbles]

Originally posted by: v8envy
There's no denying the 5870 is a good product for reasons mentioned above.

Now, here is the multi-million dollar question. Is it good enough to pay early adopter prices to upgrade?

If you own a 2x4870 or 4870x2, 285 or 295, the rational answer is "no."
If you own a 4870 or 270 and better, the answer is very likely "no" as well. Sure, it's faster -- but if you simply couldn't live with your current solution you'd have faster already. Cheaper to get a second card to match the 5870's performance otherwise.
If you are still struggling with an 8800GT or slower, the answer is a resounding "no." You're better served with an upgrade to a 4870 and for $129 and $250 left in your pocket for 2 more incremental upgrades over the next 6-12 months. Or if you must have better than 5870 performance, two 4870s for $260 and $129 left over in your pocket for tissues to dry the tears caused by running multi-GPUs.

The cards are sold out so clearly there are enough people who have to have the latest and greatest no matter what the value proposition. But aside from that I really don't see a compelling reason to upgrade right now as opposed to sitting back and waiting for the feeding frenzy to subside.

TL;DR - Nice product, not compelling enough to go crazy over.

The people who are buying want the absolute latest and greatest.

Otherwise the 5850 is what I'm sure most are really interested in, of which $259 is more than reasonable as it doesn't have any of the multi GPU headaches, offers extremely low idle power consumption (good luck with crossfired 4870s), and perfect AF.

 

[darXoul]

Originally posted by: cusideabelincoln
You're only thinking about your personal situation then, and not others. And quite frankly, you seem to be in the minority.

Yes, I'm not denying that I'm speaking from a personal PoV, that's why the YMMV statement above.

OTOH, if we consider the entire market, people who buy high end cards are a minority by definition, and in this particular "community" or target group, you can often expect that people are willing to pay a hefty premium for top performance. If we're talking about 5% performance for a 50% premium, this is just silly for most people except for those who really don't care about money. However, here I was talking about a presumed 30% performance boost for a 60% price premium.

Now, if you made a poll here or on other boards like HardOCP forums or EVGA forums expecting that I'm in the minority, you might be in for quite a surprise

 

[nemesismk2]

Just want to thank everyone at Anandtech, just finished reading your 5870 review and as always the review was excellent. It will take me a while to digest all of the information contained in your review.

 

[AzN]

Looks like 5870 seems to be limited by bandwidth. Another 30% bandwidth would be breathing down on GTX295.

 

[SlowSpyder]

Originally posted by: Azn
Looks like 5870 seems to be limited by bandwidth. Another 30% bandwidth would be breathing down on GTX295.

Are there any overclocking results in any of the reviews? I only checked a couple reviews and didn't see any. If a reviewer would push the memory speed and bench, I guess that would answer some questions.

 

[james 1]

just to update you guys in the U.K ebuyer.com has a few 5850 and 5870 in stock

 

[Stoneburner]

Originally posted by: OCguy

Originally posted by: Stoneburner
This launch is not as impressive as the 4800 series? This thing matches Nvidia's highest end card which is dual gpu! Taking price out of consideration, it's far more impressive than the 4800.

That being said, I'm far more interested in the 5770. I've switched to HTPC gaming and having crossfired 5770's with dx11 graphics could be nice

Wasnt the 4770 just ATi's test run with 40nm? Would the 5770 be the test on the next node?

Well, the 5770 is supposed to be out in october so it's doubtful it'd be on a smaller process. I've tried to google news on it but there's not much. I have cross-fired 4770's which are brilliant cards, but with the 5800's idle power draw and overall power, the 5770 might be a perfect upgrade.

And even though I think ATI did a remarkable job with this 5800 launch, I'm waiting until gt300 to see if my desktop needs an upgrade.

 

[AzN]

Originally posted by: SlowSpyder

Originally posted by: Azn
Looks like 5870 seems to be limited by bandwidth. Another 30% bandwidth would be breathing down on GTX295.

Are there any overclocking results in any of the reviews? I only checked a couple reviews and didn't see any. If a reviewer would push the memory speed and bench, I guess that would answer some questions.

There are couple benches with overclocking done but overdrive limits the card to a whopping 900/1300 from 850/1200.

http://firingsquad.com/hardwar...nce_preview/page22.asp

Shows 6% better frame rates in Crysis high settings with 6% core overclock and 8% more bandwidth.

edit:
4870 was bandwidth happy while 5870 seems to be more bandwidth hungry. A good 400 more mhz on 5870 memory clocks should saturate the card further considering everything has more than doubled on the 5870 while only increasing the bandwidth by 33%. It's still not that bad though. Not as bandwidth starved as say G92 chips that crippled its AA performance.

 

[yacoub]

This appears to be typical for the first run of a new generation of GPU hardware: The card is physically huge, runs hot and loud, but puts out some solid numbers. The refresh of this series will be the ones to wait for. They'll be more reasonably-sized, will have better cooling, may even run on a die-shrink, etc. Let's see how it all shakes out, make sure there's no serious physical or driver flaws that crop up in the first few weeks post-launch, etc. Always wise to wait at least a couple months, if not for the refresh 6 months down the road... unless you have some dire need to buy one now. Especially since we know nothing about NVidia's response just yet and that will be much clearer by year's end

 

[OCGuy]

Originally posted by: Azn

There are couple benches with overclocking done but overdrive limits the card to a whopping 900/1300 from 850/1200.

http://firingsquad.com/hardwar...nce_preview/page22.asp

Shows 6% better frame rates in Crysis high settings with 6% core overclock and 8% more bandwidth.

There are rumours of a 5890, which I'm guessing would be a 950-1ghz+ core and overclocked memory..so if you could overclock that high on the 5870, you could get a cool preview of the future.

 

[akugami]

Originally posted by: Azn
Shows 6% better frame rates in Crysis high settings with 6% core overclock and 8% more bandwidth.

4870 was bandwidth happy while 5870 seems to be more bandwidth hungry. A good 400 more mhz on 5870 memory clocks should saturate the card further considering everything has more than doubled on the 5870. It's still not bad that though. Not as bandwidth starved as say G92 chips were.

I'd like to see results with just memory overclocking to see how bandwidth starved this card is.

As for pricing, I think the Radeon 4xx0 series from ATI was more in the line of getting back mindshare and that's why you saw such low prices. I think it was unrealistic to not expect ATI to up the price a bit. The Radeon 5xx0 series is priced higher for now but they have the new video card smell on them currently and early adopters are going to snap them up regardless of price.

For those disappointed with the results, I think you might have unrealistic expectations. The Radeon 5870 seems to be in line with what you'd expect from doubling a 4870. While the 5870 is not merely a doubling of the 4870 (there are other architectural changes and improvements) it is roughly that in most instances.

For those like Keys who think beta drivers might not be an issue, I disagree. The GPU was changed to be compliant with DX11 and there were other changes and additions under the hood. Many of the changes may seem merely evolutionary but that doesn't mean they don't need to tweak the drivers to work better with the new hardware.

The DirectCompute demo ran by Anandtech shows a lot of promise on the GPGPU power of the 5870. Granted it's a tech demo but it is an nVidia tech demo. It certainly might persuade people to drop or cut short development of some CUDA based apps, which would work only on nVidia GPU's, and favor DirectCompute which would work on all GPU's. This isn't going to happen overnight obviously but the potential is there.

Either way, I'll wait for the GT300 before making a buying decision. I'm leaning towards skipping this round though. The Radeon 4870 currently satisfies my gaming needs. Granted it's not with all the bells and whistles.

 

[bryanW1995]

Originally posted by: SlowSpyder

Originally posted by: Azn
Looks like 5870 seems to be limited by bandwidth. Another 30% bandwidth would be breathing down on GTX295.

Are there any overclocking results in any of the reviews? I only checked a couple reviews and didn't see any. If a reviewer would push the memory speed and bench, I guess that would answer some questions.

One of the reviews I read had it on there (hocp maybe?), but they just used CCC, which is limited to 900 core. The memory can go higher in ccc, but they had perf degradation after 5 ghz so not much oc there. The 900 core they said worked with no problem, however.

 

[lopri]

I got some time to read other reviews than AT's, and I'm getting mixed information with respect to noise under load. (?)

 

[AzN]

Originally posted by: akugami
For those disappointed with the results, I think you might have unrealistic expectations. The Radeon 5870 seems to be in line with what you'd expect from doubling a 4870. While the 5870 is not merely a doubling of the 4870 (there are other architectural changes and improvements) it is roughly that in most instances.

Hardly disappointed with the results. I think some of the people here have unrealistic expectations or just on the green side.

What's not to like? ATI fixed all the issues with their 4870 had and still more than doubled the power of the chip and added new features and dx11. All they need is faster Gddr5 and 5870 would pull away further from GTX285 and more in tune to GTX295 territory. It's basically 2x the performance of 4870.

ATI pretty much nailed the card in such short period of time considering they've been releasing new cards left and right a while Nvidia is still scratching their heads and selling G92 cards to competitive with 4850/4830. Now I hear of Nvidia not coming out with a card until next year? ATI has this in the bags. Once the 5870x2 is released it's more of the Nvidia back peddling time. Even GT300 will not save them unless they make x2 card as well.

 

[BenSkywalker]

After reading several of the reviews, it seems like 4890CF or 275SLI are better deals then the 5870, sometimes rather easily in terms of price/performance. Looks like the 5850 is the part that should help shake things up, the only thing the 5870 seems to be in a good position to do is put pricing pressure on the 295(not necessarily a bad thing, just very far removed from the hyper competitive landscape we have come to expect lately). Waiting to see some 5850 numbers and see how that stacks up to 260SLI solutions, I'm thinking it should come out a bit ahead in the value equation, curious to see if it is by a large enough margin to put pricing pressure on that segment.

I am very impressed that ATi finally fixed the hideously ugly AF they have had for so long, some of the tests indicate that it may even be able to give the NV2x cores a run for their money in terms of quality. That to me is a FAR larger improvement then Eyefinity.

I think on realistic terms, we aren't going to see great values on this generation for quite a while. I would imagine that nV will be a decent amount faster with their high end part, and they will take full advantage of that and price it accordingly(I don't see them putting price pressure on ATi until they start losing a reasonable amount of marketshare which the 48xx line failed to do while being a much better relative value). Not a major issue for me, no game I'm playing currently comes close to pushing my current hardware, so until I do a full overhaul I'll be content and buy whatever is in the sweet spot for price performance when the time comes(probably Q1 ish).

 

[lopri]

Originally posted by: BenSkywalker
After reading several of the reviews, it seems like 4890CF or 275SLI are better deals then the 5870

!!

 

[AzN]

There's already 5850 benchmark #'s here. http://www.techpowerup.com/rev.../Radeon_HD_5870/7.html

Basically GTX 285 has been sitting there at $325-400 price range even though 4870x2 cards have been sitting at the same price and perform better yet people still buy up GTX285. This puts pressure on both GTX285 and GTX295. Once 5850 is released GTX285 should be no more than $200.

Supposedly ATI is dropping 4870x2 cards for these new cards.

 

[alcoholbob]

Originally posted by: BenSkywalker
After reading several of the reviews, it seems like 4890CF or 275SLI are better deals then the 5870, sometimes rather easily in terms of price/performance.

Those two consume more power and it won't be that long before it catches up with you. Not to mention the 5870 is a single card and you don't have to worry about scaling issues, profiles, or the dreaded minimum framerate hiccups.

 

[OneOfTheseDays]

Originally posted by: BenSkywalker
After reading several of the reviews, it seems like 4890CF or 275SLI are better deals then the 5870, sometimes rather easily in terms of price/performance.

How on earth did you come up with that conclusion? Dear God you are a moron. The 5870 gives you roughly the same performance WITHOUT the troubles of SLI or Crossfire for the same price. At this point if you want high performance it's simply a no-brainer to go with the 5870 over anything else.

 

[OCGuy]

Originally posted by: Azn

Hardly disappointed with the results. I think some of the people here have unrealistic expectations or just on the green side.

After reading comments both here and at XS, I can tell you that I am seeing similar themes, none of which appear as fanboy speak.

I think some of the disappointment may be because of the hype, even here at AT:

Originally posted by: Classy
Here is a link to another forum thread with links, Here . If true, the 5850 just crushes the 285. The 5870 blitzes the 295 . In the higher resolutions its just down right ugly. As the old saying goes, it ain't even right. Wow

http://forums.anandtech.com/me...=2336375&enterthread=y

 

[cmdrdredd]

Originally posted by: OCguy

Originally posted by: Azn

Hardly disappointed with the results. I think some of the people here have unrealistic expectations or just on the green side.

After reading comments both here and at XS, I can tell you that I am seeing similar themes, none of which appear as fanboy speak.

I think some of the disappointment may be because of the hype, even here at AT:

Originally posted by: Classy
Here is a link to another forum thread with links, Here . If true, the 5850 just crushes the 285. The 5870 blitzes the 295 . In the higher resolutions its just down right ugly. As the old saying goes, it ain't even right. Wow

http://forums.anandtech.com/me...=2336375&enterthread=y

That is too true. How many posts have been "5870 > GTX295!!!" and then you read REAL results and you get "OMG it didn't beat it by a lot!" or "it lost /cry /cry"

Lets get real, the 5870 was never meant to beat the 295, it was meant to be COMPETITIVE with it while being single GPU and thus open up the market for the 5870x2 which obviously will beat a GTX295.

Now for those of use who were sitting on a GTX295 wondering if an upgrade is ahead, there is no need. Not for a while. There is NO DX11 games available and won't be for some time to come, and your GTX295 is faster in most respects and just very very very very close ~1fps in others. I am in this category.

The good news is those of you looking for a high end card, now can buy one at good prices (GTX295 is ~$100 more expensive than the 5870), although availability is the iggest issue. Until you can buy it at newegg and walk into microcenter and frys to find them on the shelf, Nvidia has no reason to lower prices.