AMD’s Radeon HD 5850: The Other Shoe Drops
by Ryan Smith on September 30, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Conclusion
When you take the Cypress based Radeon HD 5870 and cut out 2 SIMDs and 15% of the clock speed to make a Radeon HD 5850, on paper you have a card 23% slower. In practice, that difference is only between 10% and 15% depending on the resolution. What’s not a theory is AMD’s pricing: they may have cut off 15% of the performance to make the 5850, but they have also cut the price by well more than 15%; 31% to be precise.
The result of this is clear: the 5870 is the fastest single-GPU card, and the 5850 is the value alternative. Couple that with the fact that it’s cooler running, quieter, shorter, and less power hungry, and you have a very interesting card. Design-wise the 5850 lets AMD get Cypress in to slightly smaller cases that can’t fit full 10.5” cards, something NVIDIA was never able to capitalize on with the reference GTX design (we actually had several comments on this; apparently a good number of people can’t fit 10.5” cards). The 5870/5850 situation ends up closely mirroring the 4870/4850 situation as a result; the 5870 is still the card to get when price (and size) is no object, but the 5850 is there to fill the gap if you won’t miss some of the performance.
One thing that’s very clear in these benchmarks is that as things currently stand, the 5850 has made the GTX 285 irrelevant (again). The 5850 is anywhere between 9% and 16% faster depending on the resolution, cheaper by at least $35 as of Tuesday morning (with everything besides a single BFG model going for +$70 or more), and features DirectX11. The 5850 is a card that manages to – if at times barely – outclass the GTX285 in performance. If you’ve been waiting for a price shakeup, this is what you’ve been waiting for.
Technically NVIDIA can get away with pricing the GTX285 anywhere under $260, but realistically its price needs to match its performance. With the 5850 having roughly 16% lead over the GTX 285 at 2560x1600, it doesn’t make much sense to pick up a GTX 285 unless prices fall a similar amount. This would be $225, which means lopping off at least $70 from the cheapest GTX285. If buyers believe that there’s any value in DX11, then NVIDIA would need to go even lower to offset that that gap, potentially as low at $200.
Meanwhile the $200-$225 range is the same price range the GTX 275 occupies. Cutting GTX 285 prices means cutting GTX 275 prices, which may require repricing the GTX 260, etc. NVIDIA’s response is going to bear watching if only to gauge what kind of cuts they can afford. Along the same lines we wouldn’t be surprised to see a GTX product retired due to price compression if NVIDIA can’t drop the price on the GTX 260 any further. Meanwhile vendor-overclocked cards will be the wildcard here; vendors can’t hope to completely close the gap, but the smaller performance gap will help them keep higher prices. Already we’re seeing fewer and fewer stock-clocked cards for sale compared to overclocked cards.
Update: We went window shopping again this afternoon to see if there were any GTX 285 price changes. There weren't. In fact GTX 285 supply seems pretty low; MWave, ZipZoomFly, and Newegg only have a few models in stock. We asked NVIDIA about this, but all they had to say was "demand remains strong". Given the timing, we're still suspicious that something may be afoot.
As for AMD, they’re in a much better pricing position. With the 4890 already priced under $200, the 5850 isn’t an immediate threat. If anything, the threat is a cheap GTX285 at the same price, which would outclass the 4890. It’s unlikely that the 5850 would be threatened on pricing, as we don’t expect NVIDIA to cut any more than they have to.
Moving on, we have the multi-GPU situation. While a pair of 5870s is the fastest dual-card setup out there, such a setup also pushes $760. A pair of 5850s won’t be as fast, but they also run for a far more palatable $520. 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. The 5850 still has better power performance and DX11, but it’s going to be easy to find the right price for the GTX 285 to nullify that. This is very close to being a draw.
Ultimately AMD is going to be spending at least the next few months in a very comfortable situation. They launched the world’s fastest single-GPU card last week, and they’re launching the world’s second-fastest single-GPU this week. Based on performance alone, from $220 up to the Radeon HD 5870’s price point, the Radeon HD 5850 is going to be the card to get. Meanwhile DirectX 11 is the icing on the cake that offers the 5800 series a greater lifespan and promise of future improvements in games.
For this fall, we're able to say something we haven't been able to say for quite some time: AMD has the high-end market locked up tight.
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Seramics - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
HD5800 series is bandwidth limited. The 5850 being less severe than 5870. 5850 has about 77% computing power and about 83% of memory bandwidth of 5870. So normally, 5850 should perform about 77% as fast as 5870 but it wasnt the case here. If you calculate all the benchmarks performance at all resolution, its surprisingly consistent, 5850 is always around 82-85% performance of 5870. Never did it drop to below 80% performance level, let alone coming close to 77% which is where it should be. Different game has different bandwidth requirement and there's fluctuation in percentage improvement from 4800 series to 5800 series. It unstable but 5870 for eg rarely doubles 4870, let alone 4890. So in the end, its not parallelization or scaling problems, nor was it geometry or vertex limitation (possible but less likely), it is indeed the 5800 series being limited in performance due to restricted memory bandwidth. Those of you who has 5800 cards, overclock the memory and check the scaling and you'll see wht i mean.silverblue - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Overclocking the RAM is one idea, adding more RAM is another, however it remains to be seen whether ATI will introduce a wider bus for any higher spec models.The situation is a little different to the 4830 - 4850 comparison whereby the 4830 had slightly lower clocks but only 640 SPs enabled instead of the full 800, however in the end the performance difference wasn't very large so the lack of shaders didn't cripple the 4830 too much.
Jamahl - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
I'm not convinced about that, many games run on 3 30" lcd's with no issues.More likely is the games aren't pushing the cards to their maximums, that is why you aren't getting the full effect. We will find out for sure when the 2gb version is released.
Seramics - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
If u cant see it thats ur problem, to say games arent pushing it is noobish, 1gb is still plentiful for today's games, memory buffer was nv an issue as long as its 1gb. well in the end u will see faster ram outperforming ur 2gb version. Very amazing to see many people still cant figure out the main reasons of 5870's underperformance.It is still a decent card and offer many features and definitely a better performance to price ratio card than GTX 285. But it is underperforming. Not living up to its nex gen architecture prowess. Unless GT300 screw up, it can easily outperform 5870 when its out. If AMD came out quickly with 5890, they will be wise to significantly bump up the GDDR5 speed as it is unlikely they will go with higher than 256bit design due to their "sweet spot" small die strategy.
Jamahl - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Wait...you really think that you have it figured and ATI didn't realise it? You truly believe that ATI would lower the performance of the card instead of just strapping on a 384 bus?No. Any bandwidth issues only exist in your head. Didn't you say that different games have different bandwith requirements?
Jamahl - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
Any ideas what is going on here with that?loverboy - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
I would really love to know how these games run with this added xtra.One of my main reasons for upgrading would be to play WOW on three screens (most likely in window mode).
Would it be possible to add this benchmark in the future, with the most obvious config being 3 screens in 2560/1920/1680
yolt - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
I'm looking to pick one of these up relatively quickly. My question is there really a difference in which vendor I purchase from (HIS, Powercolor, Diamond, XFX, etc). I know many offer varying warranties, but if they offer the same clock speeds, what else is there? I guess I'm looking for the most reputable brand since I won't be waiting for too many specific reviews before purchasing one. Any help is appreciated.ThePooBurner - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
Where and under what conditions/server load do you test the frame rate in WoW? I've played for years and with my 4850 i can get 100fps in the game if i am in the right spot when no one else is in the zone. Knowing when and where you do you frame rate tests for WoW would help to put it into context.Ryan Smith - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
This is from Anand:"...our test isn't representative of worst case performance - it uses a very, very light server load, unfortunately in my testing I found it nearly impossible to get a repeatable worst case test scenario while testing multiple graphics cards.
I've also found that frame rate on WoW is actually more a function of server load than GPU load, it doesn't have to do with the number of people on the screen, rather the number of people on the server :)
What our test does is simply measures which GPU (or CPU) is going to be best for WoW performance. The overall performance in the game is going to be determined by a number of factors and when it comes to WoW, server load is a huge component."