AMD's Radeon HD 5870: Before And After A Year Of Driver Updates

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I guess I am just lucky because I have been using ATI cards since the 9700 pro days and have never once experienced a driver issue. They have always been solid as a rock for me. OS has gone from Windows 98 - Windows XP 32 bit - Windows 7 64 bit.

Did have an Nvidia 6800 card for a while as well and never had any driver issues with it either although that card eventually died, lol.
 
I run a HD5850, and in the first few months of having it (over a year ago now) I had terrible stability issues, now these have gone since around 10.8 drivers, I have always had better driver support with my Nvidia Cards! But the AMD cards are better value for money or bang for buck!
 
[citation][nom]elbert[/nom]Game patch's are totally left out in this review. The author may want to revisit this review with game patch history.[/citation]

This article attempts to evaluate the effect of adjusting a single condition, drivers, on overall performance.

Adding patches into the mix introduces an additional variable which is:
1. Unnecessary, since it has nothing to do with how drivers improve performance.
2. Makes it difficult to determine how much performance gain/loss is due to drivers or due to patches. This would put into question any conclusion gained from the experiment (basic scientific method).
3. Exponentially increases the number of test's required, making it unfeasible to carry out.
 
This was a very nice article - the sort of stuff Toms has been known for. We all at some time have wondered if those incessant driver updates actually do something for us - or not. AS a result I probably wont spend as much time chasing them down and just do a quarterly update in the future.

Very nice article, much better than these Systems under a $1000 articles we get lately - and, oh yeah, no mention of power efficiency, clocks per watt or whatever... :)
 
Least over time they are showing Improvement for the most part.
Some games there were un-improvements, although notably (WoW)
Although no one like's that game anyways.
So I guess it really doesn't matter.
 
This is my card but, still I've been annoyed by the drivers since I got it.

I hope 11.4 fixes the 99% issue (One of the worst) and increases performance as much as they've said

I've heard 50% performance increases!
 
Great article. I have noticed an improvement on my crossfire 5870s over the past several releases. 11.2 is the fastest so far based on my unofficial testing methods. I would like to see AMD work on crossfire stability in the next release. I have driver failures way too often. I do use Driver Sweeper before I install a new driver version.
 
going to do something like this for the GTX400 series cards? (I had a choice between a 5850 and a GTX470 almost a year ago, and chose the GTX470. Now I have a pair of them.) I'm curious on this matter.
 
I would also love to see a Crossfire version of this (I currently use 2 5870s in my rig) as the 5000 series initially had poor scaling I believe. Would be nice to see this scientifically tested to see if there have been any improvements
 

This article attempts to evaluate the effects using old drives on the newest game code. It in no way take into account game optimizations be they good or bad for frame rate.

1. Incorrect as the older drivers were written for older code. May not take into account changes to graphic engine, DirectX changes/support, openGL changes/support, and other game optimizations. A game patch to increase visual quality for example can make the driver seem to loss performance. A games newest patch to increase performance can make older drives seem better than they were. Crysis for example added blur while turning thus for older drivers the frame rate would be higher.
2. If it were easy everyone would be testing and writing articles.
3. No this may require 2 tests for each driver tested. First test to determine added or lost performance from the pre driver patch and the second test for patch performance on the driver. The next pre driver test then may be needed as the baseline to remove patch performance gains or losses. May require adding a game patch for each increase in driver version tested.
 
[citation][nom]assmar[/nom]I know you're terribly busy, but any way we can get the CF comparisons from then and now, even if it isn't as thorough?[/citation]
If I might add... any chance we might get twin nvidia driver stories as well? (single card and sli)
 
I've had an HD 5870 since october 2009 and noticed performance improvements in Crysis Warhead (the only game the HD 5870 ever had trouble running) that were pretty significant at the 1680x1050 resolution with everything set to max (except AA at 2x). It's not so much the average frame rates that have gone up but the minimum frame rates at intense scenes (sometimes going from 20fps to 30fps). Unfortunately this doesn't really show in Tom's benchamrks that only show averages.

I'm glad I still have my 5870: it can max out any game that exists on 1680x1050 and is very energy efficient compared to more recent powerful graphic cards.

On a side note AMD's driver don't play nice with MS Visual Studio (the installer crashes, but there is a way around that) and Starcraft 2 (artifacts), but I'm sure they're working on that and it has nothing to do with the HD 5870 itself.
 
Never had problems with AMD in single GPU configurations. As a matter of fact, most of my systems have a single AMD card in them.

On the other hadn, for crossfire customers, each AMD monthly driver release ignores some issues, fixes few, and brings about new ones. After waiting a year for a good set of drivers, AMD convinced me it wasn't going to happen. High framerates with buggy performance = fail. Tired of being complacent, I switched to SLI. SLI works as advertised.
 
Hat's off to Tom's for another awesome article.

Can you please add/replace a game used for benchmarking with a Total War game? (Napolean TW or Empire TW) I feel like there are a lot of first person games on the benchmark, be it shooter or driving/flying sims but I find my CrossFired Radeon 5850 really struggles through max settings in Total War games at only 1680x1050 res, especially in the demo of the new Shogun2 TW.

I'm wondering if that's an issue with driver compatibility or just the graphical detail of full armies killing each other in vast fields of waving grass and intricate trees with the occasional shimmering rivers.

Please and thanks!
 
\^_^/ yay for 5800 series cards (5830 doesn't count). W00T

Considering I've had my first 5870 for a little over a year I'm pretty darn happy with it. Certainly need those driver updates, especially now that I'm running crossfire. Interesting how some older games still benefit from slightly older drivers. Of course, back when I will still running a k6-2 400 @ 500MHz and a TNT2 I would actually install different driver versions for different games just to get a little bit extra out of them. Anything to make it a little smoother ^_^.
 


Funny, no probs with my 5870 at all with any update... even with 11.2

I suggest you go take a good long look at your system configuration.
 
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