HD5870 and HD5850 Reviews

[flippin_waffles]

^^^^
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

Well, I suppose if reviewers like SKYMTL have this attitude that it's pointless to show hardware without showing it's maximum potential, all while ignoring the vast majority of consumers who purchase this card, why don't they show the true potential by running 3 and 6 monitor setups, to really maximize the cards potential. I've said before, the only reason I would even think about upgrading my GPU is for the multimonitor support. I've completely lost interest in seeing how big of a number I can get, and the number of people in my category seems to be growing fast. I'd rather see how new hardware would affect ME not live vicariously through a select few on the internet. Or come up with something new, be innovative. [H] tried, but they failed miserably, but at least they tried. Sticking to the same method that's been used in reviews for the last decade is failing.

[edit on SKYMTL's other response]

Good stuff, now throw in some AMD processors, Intel's last generation processors, and a few dual cores and now we're talking.