First 5850 Review

[jaredpace]

First 5850 review:




http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon...iew-crossfire/

[hurleybird]

http://techreport.com/articles.x/17652

[tajoh111]

The 5850 is a much more impressive card than the 5870 for price/performance. This is a card I can see NV having no counter for unless they price the gtx 285 just a couple hairs over 200 dollars. But they will take a certainly take a loss and the partners wont be happy.

[cegras]

I'm surprised people are not surprised by the insane performance / watt the 5870 and 5850 are offering.

[hurleybird]

The 5850 looks even more underwhelming (performace/specs) wise than the 5870. Notice how the 4890 actually beats it in Hawx in the TR review, despite having worse specs in every regard. The 5870 results looked like they might have been the caused by poor scaling, but the 5850 results make it look like something is broken. I'm going to chalk it up to drivers at this time, because I can't fathom how the RV870 architecture could have become less efficient than RV770 in terms of gaming performance.

Anyone else get the feeling that ATI might just release a 'miracle driver' at the same time as the GT300 launch?

[villa1n]

The 5850 looks even more underwhelming (performace/specs) wise than the 5870. Notice how the 4890 actually beats it in Hawx in the TR review, despite having worse specs in every regard. The 5870 results looked like they might have been the caused by poor scaling, but the 5850 results make it look like something is broken. I'm going to chalk it up to drivers at this time, because I can't fathom how the RV870 architecture could have become less efficient than RV770 in terms of gaming performance.

Its at low res, only, and in one game only, and the card is just released.
The crossfire scaling looks great, it edges out the 285 sli in almost every situation, so the price performance for me, seems to be there, along with the fact through driver maturation the performance will go up a bit. Just waiting on some non reference versions to come along, to allow for better oc'ing, might be just in time to take a gander at how gt300 performance will stack up.. but by christmas , you ll probably see a 250$ 5850, and if the X2 scales like the 4870x2 (near perfect when compared to 4870's in xfire) the price perf will be a nice little gift to myself ^^

[Stukov]

The 5850 looks even more underwhelming (performace/specs) wise than the 5870. Notice how the 4890 actually beats it in Hawx in the TR review, despite having worse specs in every regard. The 5870 results looked like they might have been the caused by poor scaling, but the 5850 results make it look like something is broken. I'm going to chalk it up to drivers at this time, because I can't fathom how the RV870 architecture could have become less efficient than RV770 in terms of gaming performance.

Anyone else get the feeling that ATI might just release a 'miracle driver' at the same time as the GT300 launch?

It is most likely drivers, but in most games they decreased power while increasing speed. The power usage is by far the most suprizing thing for the 5800 series, I just think it is too damn expensive. Shoulda launched at 199 and 299.

[annihilat0r]

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3650

[hurleybird]

Its at low res, only, and in one game only, and the card is just released.

The point is that the 4890 should never be faster, and if you were to scale up a 4890 to the 5850's specs, it's looking like it would be faster than even the current 5870. Perfmance/watt is great, sure, but the performance just doesn't match the specs. Either the engineers totally screwed things up via an obscure bottleneck that makes the chip slower per SP/TMU/ROP than RV770, or the current drivers really suck. The second possibility sounds far more likely, and that's what I'm hoping for since I have a 5870

[annihilat0r]

Anand's review shows that 5850 CF isn't scaling as well as SLI. So I think 5850 CF isn't a great option.

[randomizer]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...5850,2433.html

[jaredpace]

Anand's review shows that 5850 CF isn't scaling as well as SLI. So I think 5850 CF isn't a great option.

5850 crossfire same price as the GTX295 and 40% faster too
http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/Produc...tCode=10011224

edit: just realized 5850 Crossfire beats gtx285 sli on every bench at THG too. I don't get what you're saying.

[illectrik]

Actually I believe Hardware Canucks was the first to do a review. But thanks for the update! It doesn't seem like the 5870 preforms as well as expected.

[Vit^pr0n]

Anand's review shows that 5850 CF isn't scaling as well as SLI. So I think 5850 CF isn't a great option.

Someone needs a new pair of glasses

[Linuxfan]

The 5850 looks like a great bang-for-the-buck card! Crossfire scales well too... Good stuff coming from ATI!
Can't wait to see what Nvidia has to offer in turn...

[Dante80]

Up to 80watts lower consumption in load
120$ less
Quieter
Cooler
Shorter
Performance hit around 10-15% against 5870 (that means far better perf/watt and perf/$)
~12% More performance than GT285
Overclocks to 5870 perf easily

Ok, this is an absolute killer for the lower performance market segment. Its 4870vs4850 all over again. Only this time, they get the performance crown for single cards too.

Another thing to remember, is that nvidia does not currently have a countermeasure for this card. The GT380 will be priced for the enthusiast segment, and we can only hope for the architecture to be flexible enough to provide a 360 for the upper performance segment without killing profits due to diesize constraints. Things will get even more messy as soon as Juniper lands, the greens have to act now (thats our interest as consumers too)! And I don't think that GT200 respins will cut it.

[annihilat0r]

Someone needs a new pair of glasses

edit: just realized 5850 Crossfire beats gtx285 sli on every bench at THG too. I don't get what you're saying.

You guys are awesome! Able to reach a different conclusion from AnandTech based on their own review!

Unfortunately Crossfire scaling just isn’t as good as SLI scaling in the tests we’ve seen; the performance gap varies wildly between games, and only averages 5% across all of them. If NVIDIA lowers the price on the GTX 285 enough, that 5% difference may end up a tossup.

[Sly Fox]

Heavily matured G200 drivers vs brand new crossfire drivers.

Hmmmm... I wonder if one will improve and one will stay roughly the same...

[jaredpace]

Well if you look at the long green bar in the graphs I posted, you can see that "5 percent" scaling like 50 percent.

[annihilat0r]

Well if you look at the long green bar in the graphs I posted, you can see that "5 percent" scaling like 50 percent.

It's not 5 percent scaling, do you know English anyway? Anandtech was talking about the performance difference between SLI and CF. And while 5850 is a good deal faster than 285, because SLI scales better in those tests, the difference is only 5%.

[Eastcoasthandle]

Looks like the 5850 wins in both single and CF results. Better CF drivers will only improve on this. No different then the 4800 release.

[aslanwas]

Very impressive cards there, the 58x0s !!! Has somebody already tried LN2 ? SOme results ?

[eleeter]

Heavily matured G200 drivers vs brand new crossfire drivers.

Hmmmm... I wonder if one will improve and one will stay roughly the same...

Nvidia has their Megabang drivers waiting in the wings.

[LiquidReactor]

http://hardocp.com/article/2009/09/3..._card_review/1

5850 CF can even run Crysis at 2560x1600!

[Sly Fox]

Nvidia has their Megabang drivers waiting in the wings.