AMD’s Radeon HD 5850: The Other Shoe Drops
by Ryan Smith on September 30, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Batman: Arkham Asylum
Batman: Arkham Asylum is another brand-new PC game, and has been burning up the review charts. It’s an Unreal Engine 3 based game, something that’s not immediately obvious from just looking at it, which is rare for UE3 based games.
NVIDIA has put a lot of marketing muscle into the game as part of their The Way It’s Meant to Be Played program, and as a result it ships with PhysX support and 3D Vision support. Unfortunately NVIDIA’s influence has extended to its anti-aliasing abilities too, as its in-game selective AA abilities only work on NVIDIA’s cards. AMD’s cards can perform AA on the game, but only via traditional full screen anti-aliasing, which isn’t nearly as efficient. Because of this, this is the only game where we will not be using AA, as doing so produces meaningless results given the different AA modes used.
Since we can’t use AA, the name of the game is still “runaway performance”, with the 5850 bringing in 88fps. Meanwhile this is as close a gap between the 5850 and the GTX 285 as we’re going to see, with the 5850 beating the GTX 285 by only a few percent. The 5850 Crossfire maintains a similar gap, but doesn’t fall behind as it has in some tests.
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Ryan Smith - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
An excellent question! This isn't something we had a chance to put in the article, but I'm working on something else for later this week to take a look at exactly that. The 5850 gives us more of an ability to test that, since Overdrive isn't capped as low on a percentage basis.Zool - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
You could make some raw shader tests that doesnt depend on memory bandwith to see if the gpu internal bandwith is somehow limited or the external bandwith. And maybe try out some older games(quake3 or 3dmark2001).In DX11 games will use more shader power for other things which hawe litle impact on bandwith. Maybe they tested those heawy dx11 scenarios and ended with much less costly 256bit interface as a compromis.
Dante80 - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
Up to 80watts lower consumption in load120$ 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.
the zorro - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
maybe if intel heavily overclocks a gma 4500 can can compete with amd?haplo602 - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
hmm ... my next system shoudl feature a GTS 250. Unless ATI releases a 5670 and finaly hits opengl 3.2 and opencl support in their linux drivers.anyway the 5850 will kill lot of Nvidia cards.
san1s - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
interesting results, can't wait to see how gt300 will comparepalladium - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
"interesting results, can't wait to see how gt300 will compare "SiliconDoc: WTF?! 5870< GTX295, top end GT300>>295 because it has 384bit GDDR5 ( 5870 only 256 bit), so naturally GT300 will KICK RV8xx's A**!!!!
That's my prediction anyway (hopefully he decides not to troll here)
Dobs - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
My guess is - GT300 wont compare to 5850 or 5870.It will compare with the 5870X2 and be in the price bracket. (Too much for most of us.)
When the GT300 eventually gets released that is.... Then a few months later again nvidia will bring out the scaled down versions in the same price brackets as the 5850/5870 that will probably compete pretty well.
Only question is - can you wait?
You could wait for the 6870 as well:P
Vinas - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
No, I don't have to wait because I have a 5870 :-)The0ne - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
I really think enthusiast that spends hundreds on the MB alone isn't the regular enthusiast. So price wouldn't be an issue. I love building PCs and testing them but I'm not going to spend $200+ of a MB knowing that I will be building another system in few months with better performance parts and pricing. Unless I'm really keeping the system for a long time then I'll pour my hard earn money into the high end parts. But then if you're doing this I don't think you're really an enthusiast as it's really a one shot deal?