5870 single,dual,tri vs 285 benchmarks...

[railmeat]

Clash of the Titans

ATI Radeon HD 5870 Single, Crossfire and TriFire VS GTX 285 Single, Dual and Tri Sli

By: Wassee Syed -- 10/23/09








We use the following system for this article:

I7 920 @ 4.2 GHZ (203 X 21) HT enabled

EVGA X58 X3 SLI

Patriot Viper 2 X 2 GB DDR3 RAM @ 1620 9-9-9-24

Cooler Master 850 Watt PSU

3 X Diamond Radeon 5870 (Catalyst 8.66)

3 X EVGA GTX 285 (Forceware 191.07)

Vista X64




----benches---

Crysis Warhead
Far Cry 2
Tom Clancy's HAWX Demo
Lost Planet Demo
Stalker: Clear Sky Benchmark
World in Conflict Demo
Necrovision Demo
3D Mark Vantage



"It is disappointing to see that Three cards in Crossfire are not yielding any gains over dual cards. In fact the performance is being hurt. The GTX 285 on the other hand is scaling quite well."




"5870 TriFire stands out here. I believe the RAM is holding it back more than anything else, but it just goes to show the sheer power of these monster cards. "








"No GPU performance analysis would be complete without Crysis. Crysis came out in November 2007, and to date it is the single most graphically intense GPU benchmark. Run this game at 2560 X 1600 at very high quality and AA enabled, and any graphics system would choke and cough and drop to its knees. An expansion pack for the game, Crysis Warhead was released in September 2008 and supposedly runs and looks better than the original Crysis. My testing was done without AA so we could get some reasonable numbers. "















full review below

http://benchmarkextreme.com/Articles...riFire/P2.html




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heaven benchmark dx11 ONLY.....

download

http://downloads.guru3d.com/Unigine-...load-2414.html

discussion
http://www.evga.com/FORUMS/tm.asp?m=100985335

[Garrett]

Interesting read, thanks for posting

[railmeat]

Interesting read, thanks for posting

yes it was interesting,another gen were ati cant get there drivers right.lol nothing new here....shame.so weird to here guys say "o just wait for the new driver release"...lol?? most of the benchmarks the 5870 really romped too...i dunno ati make incredible hardware and always have half-ass software..

nothing worth even considering til i see gtx 300,larabee,or 5870x2....

[saaya]

yeah if your on 285 tri sli or 295 quad sli right now upgrading to two or three 5870s would actually be a step back...
i hope they can get the half broken xfire scaling going soon, and even single 5870s should be even faster once the drivers are working at full speed.

but you make it sound as if nvidia is doing things in a different way... well they launched the G80, a dx10.0 card, and didnt support dx10 AT ALL for how many months?
and after that their drivers caused so many crashes microsoft publicly gave them a slap in the face for it and told them to get their act together...

its a shame that there is no TUV for software and drivers... there really should be... and for BIOS as well.
im really annoyed by all companies launching software and hardware that doesnt actually work... beta was cool a while ago cause you get unreleased software and can check out what things will be like in a few months or even a year from now... but then beta became the norm... now almost everything is beta at release if not alfa and a lot of it never gets fixed 100%... a real shame

imo WHQL is not enough, we need a way more detailled spec that hardware and software has to pass, and if it doesnt, too bad... the manufacturer cant just sell it anyways and claim to fix it later. maybe there should be a psu like certification... if your software mostly works, it gets a silver rating, if it passes all tests it gets a gold rating etc...

[billdavis]

I thought Nvidia paid futurmark to build the test to suck on ati

J/K

[zalbard]

Drivers with proper (well, more or less!) CF scaling are released already so this info is outdated.
But yeah, CF was pretty pathetic at the release, no doubt.

[aslanwas]

call me back, if they have new drivers

[Dezmen]

Hey railmeat, can you try pur Sli 285 and 1 5870. Wondering if it can handle DX11... And for example test Unigine 11..

[railmeat]

yeah if your on 285 tri sli or 295 quad sli right now upgrading to two or three 5870s would actually be a step back...
i hope they can get the half broken xfire scaling going soon, and even single 5870s should be even faster once the drivers are working at full speed.

but you make it sound as if nvidia is doing things in a different way... well they launched the G80, a dx10.0 card, and didnt support dx10 AT ALL for how many months?
and after that their drivers caused so many crashes microsoft publicly gave them a slap in the face for it and told them to get their act together...

its a shame that there is no TUV for software and drivers... there really should be... and for BIOS as well.
im really annoyed by all companies launching software and hardware that doesnt actually work... beta was cool a while ago cause you get unreleased software and can check out what things will be like in a few months or even a year from now... but then beta became the norm... now almost everything is beta at release if not alfa and a lot of it never gets fixed 100%... a real shame

imo WHQL is not enough, we need a way more detailled spec that hardware and software has to pass, and if it doesnt, too bad... the manufacturer cant just sell it anyways and claim to fix it later. maybe there should be a psu like certification... if your software mostly works, it gets a silver rating, if it passes all tests it gets a gold rating etc...

"but you make it sound as if nvidia is doing things in a different way..."

umm not really,im just reading the numbers.5870 on paper is AMAZING hardware wise.but since the 9800pro/xtx days always having ppl hanging on the edge of insanity releasing amazing hardware with promised driver support and not coming threw when needed they lost my buissness?after reading that report it looks like not to much changed...i dunno.

when bf2 was thee most ground shaking,mind blowing game few years ago.me and a buddy grabbed the 9800 series and COULD NOT run above 1600x1200 res.in the release notes we read from EA "ati users trying to run above 1600x1200 getting black screen please lower resolution til ati comes out with new driver release".the day after i read that i overnighted a 6800ultra plopped it in running 1800x1440,2048x1536 without a hitch and i never looked back.....

for the record.i think ati make better hardware on paper,but for gamers nvidia comes plug and play.if u ever noticed before a game is about to release nvidia has new drivers out already coded for that game.i need plug and play as a noob gamer and take lesser of a card for that reason.




i always said as i have been running running xfire boards my last 3 mobos i would switch to ati in a heartbeat if i was told/seen/read there driver support got better.i have not seen/read that yet.






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i dont know these ppl below but have hundreds of PAGES of same complaints in diff forums ppl using diff gen ati cards running games who spent ALOT of money and pulling hair out of head,there all wrong?

ATI vs Nvidia : Driver Stability


http://74.125.93.132/search?q=cache:...&ct=clnk&gl=us

"Another thing with Ati ... i've never experienced with nvidia is that the installer/uninstaller can screw up to the extent that I had to re-install the OS simply because the cat 9.3(for that matter every cat from 8.7 onward) setup would not recognize the ATi card after I'd uninstalled the 9.2s."

"ati drivers are crap , their high end cards like x2 have poor driver support also , why will som1 buy ati high end card when they cant even get the crossfire to work easily. ati forums is full of people having driver problems , atleast nvidia releases quick updates , its users problem if they cant update .
i am also shifting to nvidia from ati"


"ATi drivers are very very buggy especially if you have an x2 card/ 2 cards in cfx...On my 3870x2 GRiD and DiRT wouldnt work with AA enabled, assassins creed kept crashing and drivers kept failing and recovering during crysis...On my 295 however everything is fine, all games play very well, no glitches yet."

"I'm not satisfied with the driver support to be honest. It's extremely buggy. It keeps having conflicts with some or the other games. You can check with people who have previously used Nvidia cards & have now used ATI & ended up having issues with ATI cards, which they never had of Nvidia cards. I don't doubt it's better in terms of IQ as opposed to Nvidia, but the stability with games is better with Nvidia drivers. My friend (who has a HD4870) & myself got it around the same time & often end up having discussions of some or the other issues. He was planning on switching to a GTX260. I, on the other hand, am not going to switch anytime soon. Will buy a console, may be, but not switch my graphic card. Provided an opportunity now, I would gladly shift to Nvidia." - 09-03-2009, 01:49 PM

[Utnorris]

This article has been discussed on several forums and there are a lot issues with the article itself, I.E. his claim that the 850 PSU is capable of 128 amps. He is supposed to be correcting that. He realizes that new drivers have come out that should increase CF benchmarks and he will be re-running those benches and will update the article. But really, was any of this a surprise to anyone? It's new hardware versus old hardware, it should be better. Crysis is the only game that really favors Nvidia, so I do not know why we even look at it anymore. There have been plenty of reviews on CF with the HD5870's and while it is not perfect it is still pretty damn good. As drivers mature scaling will improve, always does.

As far as the posts showing people complaining, there are just as many complaining about Nvidia and SLI. Neither system is perfect. The hope is that the Lucid chip will fix this, but we won't see that till the first of the year. And really, except for benching, Crysis or a 30" 2500x1600 monitor, why do you need CF or SLI? The shear fact that a single HD5870 gives a GTX295 a run for the money (sometimes beating it) and costs anywhere from $70 to $150 less, that's pretty nice. When the GTX300 series releases we will be having all the same discussion with ATI and Nvidia changing places, happens everytime a new generation is released.

[perkam]

Railmeat, that's one review only.

Here is another one...from a little review site called Anandtech:



Don't believe everything you read.

Perkam

[NaMcO]

Proper drivers will probably come out in October 2010, just hang on tight

[eric66]

what a load of bs i think this is for nvidia boys to satisfy themselfs lol