HD5870 and HD5850 Reviews

[saaya]

I wonder if 5870CF is going to be faster than the 5870X2?

first of all, there seem to be serious issues with 5800 xfire, so those numbers anandtech showed will def improve...
but overall, yes, 5870x2 will DEF be slower than 5870CF, always...
with 5870x2 your limited by power and heat, with 5870CF your not...

Anand, bit-tech, Hcanucks,....., and it can´t beat easy the 4870x2.
With same specs, better clocks, and without de handicap of crossfire, i expected better performance in all games. So, yes, the results with the drivers used is a bit dissapointing.

well, in some tests its 5% or 10% in the lead... but yes, its not clearly faster than the 4870x2... its more of a replacement for the 4870x2, and the fact that its single gpu makes it a good replacement even if it ONLY offers about the same perf... at least in my opinion... and xbit and anandtech seem to agree...

but yes, i also expected more... and im confused why the 5870 doesnt do better...

Unlike some people, I am of the opinion that history has shown that new drivers do not increase the performance of a single chip card unless there are issues to begin with. Dual GPU cards? Yes, new drivers definately increase performance in existing games.

Where single GPU cards get performance increases is with new games that hadn't been optimized in past drivers or fixing errors with performance in current games. One example of an issue is the HD 5870's HawX DX10.1 performance. I am sure that will be fixed in future revisions.

Otherwise, I will put money on the fact that the HD 5870 will never beat the HD 4870X2 on a regular basis even with driver revisions. There is a substantial bandwidth gap between the two making equalized performance next to impossible.

check the xbitlabs article about this, called driver scaling with 4870 iirc... from half a year back... they showed that in several games perf had improved around 10%... thats not much, but if youd compare 8.7 to 9.9 im sure youd see more than a 10% boost for a 4870... probably around 15-20% in several games... and not just av fps, min fps has increased as well...

its unusual for this to happen though, and its nowhere near the perf jumps dual gpu setups make with driver updates, def agree on that...

looking at all results of the reviews ive seen so far, id say 4870x2 is roughly equal to a 5870, and 5870 is single gpu so thats making it the winner...
even if it will never beat the 4870x2 accorss the board, i dont care, its single gpu and thats worth more than 5% perf imo... especially if you look at what fps numbers we are talking about here...

my current impression after having read several reviews is this:
5870: fails to beat 295 and 4870x2, but does about the same with only 1 gpu... price needs to be reduced to 300-350$ then itll be a very sweet deal

5850: notably beats 285 at almost 100$ lower price, good deal for people who dont have a 285 or faster atm...

im really curious about 5740 or whatever juniper is called?
4890 perf at 99$ with dx11?

saaya: It's hard to see you base your conclusions on a techpowerup review that used 6 gb of ram on a 32 bit system - or am I missing something here?

what does that have to do with anything
he probably has a 64bit partition but hes doing 32bit for now cause thats what he built his db with and he doesnt wanna mix 32 and 64bit...

that very few games require more than 2gb ?

require? 0
benefit? i only know of one, gta4, and that seems to only happen at mega res and in some scenarios...

HD 5850 is listed at €200 in Europe... 88% performance of the Radeon HD 5870 AND it outperforms the GTX 285 easily;
if you don't have a 30" screen and don't play on triple monitor carnage, the HD 5850 seems to be the card to go; all the other cards in the €150-200 bracket will have to reduce their prices to remain valuable as an option; any card over €200 which is not faster than HD 5850... don't buy.

IF you dont have a gtx285 already... and even if you have a 4890 id rather wait than upgrade... i mean really, what for? what can you play with a 5850 that you cant play with a 4890 or even 4870?