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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
95 Comments
View All Comments
chizow - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
Ya it already sounds like the 5870X2 and 5850X2 are being positioned in the media to compete with just a single GT300 with rumors of $500 price points. I think the combination of poor scaling compared to RV770/RV790 in addition to some of the 5850/5870 CF scaling problems seen in today's review are major contributing factors. Really makes you wonder how much of these scaling issues are driver problems, CPU/platform limitations, or RV870 design limitiations.My best guess for GT300 pricing will be:
$500-$550 for a GTX 380 (full GT300 die) including OC variants
$380-$420 for a GTX 360 (cut down GT300) including OC variants
$250 and lower GTX 285 followed by GT210 40nm GT200 refresh with DX10.1
So you'd have the 5870X2 competing with GTX 380 in the $500-600 range. Maybe the 5850X2 in the $400-$500 range competing with the GTX 360. 5870 already looks poised for a price cut given X2 price leaks, maybe they introduce a 2GB part and keep it at the $380 range and drop the 1GB part. Then at some point I'd expect Nvidia to roll out their GT300 GX2 part as needed somewhere in the $650-700+ range.....
yacoub - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
Nah. They won't get enough sales at those prices. They need to slot in under $399 and $299 unless they put out 50% more performance than the 5870 and 5850 respectively.Or the heck with them, I'll just wait six months for the refresh on a smaller die, better board layout with better cooling, lower power, and a better price tag.
It's not like i NEED DX11 now, and i certainly don't need more GPU performance than I already have.
chizow - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
How would it need to be 50% faster? It'd only need to be ~33% faster when comparing the GTX 380 to the 5870 or GTX 360 to the 5850. That would put the 5870 and 360 in direct competition in both price and performance, which is right on and similar to past market segments. The 380 would then be competing with the 5870X2 at the high-end, which would be just about right if the 5870X2 scales to ~30% over the 5870 similar to 5870CF performance in reviews.Gary Key - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
"It's not like i NEED DX11 now, and i certainly don't need more GPU performance than I already have. "As of today I am limping along on a GTX275 (LOL) and I really cannot tell any differences between the cards at 1920x1080. Considering the majority of PC games coming for the next year are console ports with a few DX10/11 highlights thrown in for marketing purposes, I am really wondering what is going to happen to the high-end GPU market. That said, I bought a 5850 anyway. ;)
chizow - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link
I'm running GTX 280 SLI right now and have found most modern games run extremely well with at least 4xTrMSAA enabled. But that's starting to change somewhat, especially once you throw in peripheral features like Ambient Occlusion, PhysX, Eyefinity, 3D Vision, 120Hz monitors or whatever else is next on the checkbox horizon.While some people may think these features are useless, it only really takes 1 killer app to make what you thought was plenty good enough completely insufficient. For me right now, its Batman Arkham Asylum with PhysX. Parts of the game still crawl with AA + PhysX enabled.
Same for anyone looking at Eyefinity as a viable gaming option. Increasing GPU load three-fold is going to quickly eat into the 5850/5870's increase over last-gen parts to the point a single card isn't suitable.
And with Win7's launch and the rollout of DX11 and DirectCompute, we may finally start to see developers embrace GPU accelerated physics, which will again, raise the bar in terms of performance requirements.
There's no doubt the IHVs are looking at peripheral features to justify additional hardware costs, but I think the high-end GPU market will be safe at least through this round even without them. Maybe next round as some of these features take hold, they'll help justify the next round of high-end GPU.
chrnochime - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
With PC gaming seemingly going towards MMO like WoW/Aion/Warhammer (and later on Diablo 3) and far less emphasis on other genre(besides FPS, which is more or less the same every year), and as you said most new games being console ports, I really doubt we'll need anything more powerful than the 4890, let alone a 5850 or 5870 for the coming couple of years. Maybe we've enter the era where PC games will forever be just console ports + MMO, or just MMO, and there'd be little incentive to buy any card that cost 100+.Just my take of course.
C'DaleRider - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
I was told by a Microcenter employee the current pre-order retail price for the top end GT300 card was $579, an EVGA card, btw. And reportedly the next model down is the GT350. Dunno if this is fact or not, but he didn't have any reason to lie.Zool - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
The GT300 will need 512bit gddr5 to make memory faster than GT200 and it will hawe even more masive GPGPU bloat than last gen. So in folding it will be surely much faster but in graphic it will cost much more for the same(at least for nvidia depending how close they want to bring it to radeon 5k). And of course they can sell the same gt300 in tesla cards for several thousand(like they did with gt200).The 5850 price with disabled units is still win for ati or else they wouldnt sell the defect gpu at all.
Genx87 - Friday, October 2, 2009 - link
GDDR5 provides double the bandwidth of CGDDR3. No need for 512bit memory bus. This was covered in another story on the front of this site.dagamer34 - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
As great as these cards are, my system only supports low-profile cards since it's a HTPC. Bring on the Radeon HD 5650 & 5670!!!!