The 5870 is fast, that's for sure, but looking like and enhanced and doubled 4890 it should be much faster, and definitely shouldn't be beat by 4890CF across the board. The card has power, but obviously isn't able to use very well. The two main culprits are immature drivers and a possible bandwidth bottleneck. While we have to wait and see for drivers, anyone with a 5870 in hand can easily test if the memory system is at fault.

This is a call for anyone who has a 5870 right now, and if no one steps up to the plate I will when mine comes in. A good methodology would be dropping the core and memory frequencies in half while observing how the performance changes across various programs (especially those that the 5870 doesn't scale well in, like hawx) as core and memory are individually adjusted. Come on guys, lets get to it!