Radeon HD 5850: Knocking Down GTX 295 In CrossFire

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[citation][nom]philosofool[/nom]"The Radeon HD 4800-series was a staggering improvement, catapulting ATI right onto Nvidia’s heels. It was a second-place finish,"I don't know what you guys are talking about here. ATI completely owned nVidia in the last go round of graphics, unless you consider that tiny market that includes $200+ processors. nVidia is getting schooled right now: ATI is calling the shots. How much would a GTX 260 cost if not for ATI? About $250.[/citation]
Do you understand the difference between sales, popularity and performance? Tom’s is talking about performance, not popularity or sales.
 
Im gonna wait till i can see both ATI and Nvidia's dual chip cards in a side by side comparison, playing the same game, before I pull the trigger.

I like pretty visuals, not just benchmarks.
 
[citation][nom]annisman[/nom]Specifically for this article, I would like to know how you benched Crysis. Did you use the in-game benchmark tool running a set number of runs, or with a FRAPS recorded sessions of say 15 minutes of gameplay ? I'd like to know, to compare specificly with my setup which is almost identical to your 5870CF setup used in this review, thanks.[/citation]

Heya Annis,
Used the Crysis Benchmarking Tool with the GPU Benchmark--the SSDs in this system are intended specifically to alleviate the I/O bottleneck you often see in the flyby.
 
[citation][nom]anamaniac[/nom]As much as I like these cards (the 5870 I mean, as I nearly bought two and a new PSU to handle them), I think I'll wait for the Nvidia 3xx series.They're nice and fast, but now my own hype is dieing out, and I just want to see Nvidia's new batch.Eyeinffinity is cool though, nice to see someone brought spanview back if it wasn't going to be microsoft.I hope DX11 has a high adoption rate... (Maybe a DX11 version of warcraft 3 also supporting resolutions over 1280x1024... man this game is getting old, but it's so awesome. Also fix warcraft 3's hosting errors...)Great article as always Angelini.P.S. What about the GTX 280? It's closer to the price range of the 5850 if you want a more direct comparision.[/citation]

Good point on the GTX 280 anamaniac. We're getting such short lead-times for these stories that it's hard to decide where to cut, but I do have a trio of 280s here still that could show up in a future piece if there's interest!
 
[citation][nom]nurgletheunclean[/nom]And yet again I have to go somewhere else to find the overclocking results.http://www.guru3d.com/article/rade [...] ossfire/21[/citation]

These cards plus the 5870s maxed out with CCC, no problem. The results weren't particularly noteworthy, though.
 
[citation][nom]grimjester[/nom]There have been several posts asking for different charts. I'll add one: I'd like to see a plot of price on the x-axis and frame rate on the y-axis. It would make it easier to see value for money without having the problems that every single-number price/performance index has.[/citation]

Thanks for the feedback grim. What frame rate, though? Cumulative of all tested games? We've tried this one before and received a lot of negative feedback on the high-fps games biasing the result. Please feel free to weigh in!
 
[citation][nom]bounty[/nom]"Two dual-link DVI outputs, an HDMI connector, and a DisplayPort can be mixed and matched for any combination of three digital outputs."I thought I read somewhere that one of the dual-link DVI outputs is shared with the HDMI, so you can't do DVI-DVI-HDMI out for eyefinity.[/citation]

Good call. I was operating on the diagram on this page: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-5870,2422-8.html, and you're right. With only two timing sources, you NEED to be using at least one DisplayPort output in order to utilize three displays. Fixed!
 
Excellent card on the budget side from AMD/ATI. I'm sure with a 3 month lead ATI should be able to grab a good share of the market with the 5800 series cards.

On the flip side, Nvidia is brewing something special for it's GT300 a.k.a Fermi architecture. More can read here
Apparently the comment that Nvidia made about DX11 not being the main driving force behind GPU sales seem to be more aligned with it's new architecture. The GT300 is more focused on GPGPU (or as they called it cGPU) support, it will natively support C [CUDA], C++, DirectCompute, DirectX 11, Fortran, OpenCL, OpenGL 3.1 and OpenGL 3.2.

Should be a interesting battle when GT300 is launched. Another win win for us customers.
 
I wish ATI would make better drivers. for many of their cards they have fallen behind nvidia in performance even though the hardware was faster

same as with this card, the actual performance is less than what the hardware abilities are.

ATI has good hardware they just have bad drivers
 
I hope EVERYONE can see this is article is just pure ATI ass kissing favoritism. Every win by a NVDIA board is explained off as a anomaly. lol talk about biased hypocrites.
 
I'll get HD 5850 as soon as there's a DX11 game that I really like. By this time there might be a refresh of cards, or entirely new models. I really wanted to upgrade 4850 1G --> 5850, but decided to wait.
 
cangelini, just a thought...

Some people have commented in various ways about where a particular
result is positioned in the charges, eg. dual-GPU results being
next to each other, or 5850 next to GTX285, etc.

How about this instead: allow the viewer to move the results
around? Each result is on its own 'line', so a simple up/down
arrow button on each line and a spot of Java... possible? This
way, one can group results together to compare in whatever way
one wishes, which should satisfy everyone.

Ian.

 
I hope a single graphics card comes out soon (maybe Nvidia's offerings), that can play Crysis at Very High Details 8x AA at 60 fps. From ATI/AMDs cards so far, looks like we are only halfway there.
 
i havent read the entire article, but how come you guys didnt add a gtx 295 sli configuration to your benchmarking?
 
[citation][nom]cangelini[/nom]Thanks for the feedback grim. What frame rate, though? Cumulative of all tested games? We've tried this one before and received a lot of negative feedback on the high-fps games biasing the result. Please feel free to weigh in![/citation]
It would probably be best not to sum over games and/or resolutions. You could make separate charts for separate resolutions and have different colored dots for different games. I don't think the chart would get too confusing since a single card has dots right above each other.

I tried to find a good example but I guess this will have to do. The "Server AAA" and BBB would be, for example, Crysis and Far Cry 2, "server load" would be price of card(s), "response time" would be fps.

Again, I don't think it's a good idea to add fps from different games or resolutions to a single score. You get a lot of >60 and
 
@ rycroft

My opinion is that with such a short lead time for the articles Chris probably had to choose the most relevant cards to compare. You could do tri-sli gtx 295's and quad CF 5870's and 5850's etc, but it would be less relevant to even most high end gamers.

There are only a very lucky few that could afford such a ridiculously powerful setup. And you might even end up needing 2 power supplies and other tweaks that would really require a whole new test setup. I am sure if there is a lot of interest someone will do one, but this is the first review for squeezing out the most relevant details.
 
Good article ! But, personally.. I think it's hard for me to make a decision for these ATI cards right now. Specially if performance is the only tangible benefit. Support for DX11 is a nice thing to have, but only if there is software out there that can take advantage of it. Even if development for dx11 starts today, still ... it will take at least a couple years before we even see a pure dx11 game. God only knows what cards will out by them.
 
Why no 2560x1600 on the Bloomfield vs. Lynnfield? That is the only resolution you would really need crossfire/sli for and it would be nice to know if there is a penalty to choosing Lynnfield over Bloomfield.
 
im wondering... where are nvidia fanboys these days?! come out and say somethin' !!!

imagine how the benchmarks for real dx11 games will look like 8->

ATI rocks!
 
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