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
Crysis: Warhead
As Crysis is the only game that particularly struggled under even a single 5870, this is the only game we’ve gone ahead and captured data for at resolutions other than 2560.
The 5970 gains the distinction of being the only single-card setup we have tested that can break 30fps on Crysis at 2560 – it’s enough to at least push Crysis in to playable territory here, even though we’ll gladly take more performance if we can get it. So Crysis hasn’t quite fallen yet, but it’s very close. It’s also something where the 5970CF results would be quite interesting if we had them.
Interestingly, the 5970 manages to lose not only to the 5870CF, but the 5850CF by a very slight amount. The 5970 is clocked exactly the same as the 5850CF and has 2 more SIMDs, so we certainly aren’t expecting it to lose here. This may be driver related or it may be PCIe bandwidth related (each half of the 5970 only gets 8x bandwidth) but we aren’t sure which.
Meanwhile the GTX 295 sees the first of many falls here. It falls behind the 5970 by 30%-40%. The 5870 gave it a run for its money, so this is no surprise.
Finally, overclocking the 5970 to 5870 speeds nets you another 14%-18% in performance, which is quite interesting since the theoretical difference is only supposed to be 15%. But these numbers are repeatable; the 5970 likes being overclocked here.
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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.