Quote Originally Posted by SKYMTL View Post
What the use of putting up a subjective review where the top 3 cards nicely smash into a CPU bottleneck again and again? The reason reviewers push their chips to high clocks is to get a differentiation between the cards' scores. Due to the nature of the majority of today's games, many high end cards will bottleneck at 1680 and even 1920 resolution in some cases even with an i7 @ 4Ghz let alone a C2Q.
^^^^
Yeah what he says.

Ever since 4870x2 launched on August 12, 2008 - there has been little motivation to upgrade. As appealing as dual 30" 2560x1600 may be, or 8xAA.. its the very definition of excessive. Heck most "chumps" with 22-24" LCD or 50" HDTV are stuck at 1920x1080.. making 25x16 results irrelevant.

Look at the 5870 and 5870 CF benchmarks:
- Half the games are CPU limited.. all Dual-GPU/CF converge at some crazy high 150-300fps limit.
- Another big portion like Fallout3, FarCry2, STALKER, RE5, Batman, and especially HAWX show HD 5870 bandwidth starved and falling far behind 4870x2.
- Finally, very shader intensive Crysis and others show HD 5870 taking clear lead.

But whats really the relevance if HD 5870 is 10% or 50% faster than GTX285 at 2560x1600 8xAA. 40 fps vs 30fps looks impressive, but neither is playabe. And even if it was, AND you had such a monitor, would $$$ justify the higher resolution.

Both put up similar 70-100 fps avg at 19x10 4xAA in virtually every game (Crysis excluded ofcourse).

Bottom line: regardless of how high HD 5870, or GT300 score, until users upgrade from existing 1080p displays, there's little benefit to upgrading existing GTX285/GTX275/HD4890/HD4870.

... until ofcourse next must have game like Half Life 3 or Doom4 requires DX11