The Radeon HD 5970: Completing AMD's Takeover of the High End GPU Market
by Ryan Smith on November 18, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Left 4 Dead
Finally we have Left 4 Dead, another title that’s fairly easy on the GPU. The game is approaching (if it has not already hit) a CPU limitation, even with multi-core rendering. 145fps appears to be the approximate cap, and our cards quickly approach this. Because of this cap, the overclocking advantage is only 3%, and the 1% difference between the 5970 and 5850CF is practically immaterial.
Finally the GTX 295 gap is only 17% here, thanks to these cards coming up against our CPU limitation.
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SJD - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - link
Thanks Anand,That kind of explains it, but I'm still confused about the whole thing. If your third monitor supported mini-DP then you wouldn't need an active adapter, right? Why is this when mini-DP and regular DP are the 'same' appart from the actual plug size. I thought the whole timing issue was only relevant when wanting a third 'DVI' (/HDMI) output from the card.
Simon
CrystalBay - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - link
WTH is really up at TWSC ?Jacerie - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - link
All the single game tests are great and all, but once I would love to see AT run a series of video card tests where multiple instances of games like EVE Online are running. While single instance tests are great for the FPS crowd, all us crazy high-end MMO players need some love too.Makaveli - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - link
Jacerie the problem with benching MMO's and why you don't see more of them is all the other factors that come into play. You have to now deal with server latency, you also have no control of how many players are usually in the server at any given time when running benchmarks. There is just to many variables that would not make the benchmarks repeatable and valid for comparison purposes!mesiah - Thursday, November 19, 2009 - link
I think more what he is interested in is how well the card can render multiple instances of the game running at once. This could easily be done with a private server or even a demo written with the game engine. It would not be real world data, but it would give an idea of performance scaling when multiple instances of a game are running. Myself being an occasional "Dual boxer" I wouldn't mind seeing the data myself.Jacerie - Thursday, November 19, 2009 - link
That's exactly what I was trying to get at. It's not uncommon for me to be running at lease two instances of EVE with an entire assortment of other apps in the background. My current 3870X2 does the job just fine, but with 7 out and DX11 around the corner I'd like to know how much money I'm going to need to stash away to keep the same level of usability I have now with the newer cards.Zool - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - link
The so fast is only becouse 95% of the games are dx9 xbox ports. Still crysis is the most demanding game out there quite a time (it need to be added that it has a very lazy engine). In Age of Conan the diference in dx9 and dx10 is more than half(with plenty of those efects on screen even1/3) the fps drop. Those advanced shader efects that they are showing in demos are actualy much more demanding on the gpu than the dx9 shaders. Its just the thing they dont mention it. It will be same with dx11. A full dx11 game with all those fancy shaders will be on the level of crysis.crazzyeddie - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - link
... after their first 40nm test chips came back as being less impressive than **there** 55nm and 65nm test chips were.silverblue - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - link
Hehe, I saw that one too.frozentundra123456 - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - link
Unfortunately, since playing MW2, my question is: are there enough games that are sufficiently superior on the PC to justify the inital expense and power usage of this card? Maybe thats where eyefinity for AMD and PhysX for nVidia come in: they at least differentiate the PC experience from the console.I hate to say it, but to me there just do not seem to be enough games optimized for the PC to justify the price and power usage of this card, that is unless one has money to burn.