ATI 5870 reviews

[Asus]

ATI is doing the same strategy this year as last. Making a low power GPU and having the dual chip version compete against Nvidia's highest and it's single chip version a step down from there. Last year it worked really well as their performance was better than they thought and the cards were cheap cheap in comparison to Nvidia's initial prices.

Power consumption is awesome. Idle is just 27W for the card. The previous generation was 90W.
Load is low as well.
Although the card's length is long. 10.5"
Same size as a 4870 X2 or GTX 260 I believe.

It finally streams uncompressed PCM, Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio to a receiver without messing with the audio. Before if you had Blu-ray on a PC you had to live with a lossy audio format or buy an expensive audio card.

Here are a couple reviews of ATI's new single chip card. The 5870 has twice the shaders and texture units compared to the 4870. So it will be similar to a 4870 X2 in performance. They are doing full AA. And have added SuperSampling (AA on every pixel, not just edges). They have crossfire in the review but not a 5870 X2. Should come later. Would be nice to see a 5870 X2 in crossfire...

The Tech Report
Anandtech

 

[Ravioli]

Better than nvidias 295? or upcoming 300 series?

Its always like this:
Nvidia releases monster GPU -->ATI waits 8 months then releases competing GPU for cheaper ---> Nvidia releases next monster GPU, bitch slapping ATI back to second place
Repeat infinity

 

[Asus]

ATI has had a number of releases that were late. But the only release that was lack luster recently was the HD 2900. The power of the chip never got fully used and had bottlenecks as well. Wasn't a smart design like the 3800 and 4800. The 2900 has 700 million transistors but the 3800 only had 666 million and was faster.

This is ATI's DX11 part. Not a mini refresh. Nvidia's DX11 part will be late (Christmas 2009/early 2010). It looks like ATI's mid part (5700?) will trump or match their previous performance part 4870/4850 which is how it should be. A lot of times last years high end part still beats a new mid card pretty badly.

The reviews show the single chip 5870 competitive with Nvidia's dual chip GTX 295 (295 beats it in ultra high res). ATI's dual chip 5870 X2 is coming soon which should, in your words, bitch slap it back to second place. (see 5870's crossfire performance)

 

[Warped]

i bet this card is going to be $600 and in 1 year $350, then 1 more year it'll be $150 which is when I'll buy it

 

[PvtRyan]

i bet this card is going to be $600 and in 1 year $350, then 1 more year it'll be $150 which is when I'll buy it

It's going for $350ish right now.

 

[Asus]

Yeah, ATI has been aiming for lower power and smaller chips which means it makes more money, can sell cards for less and makes Nvidia drop their prices like a rock. Also lets them put 2 chips on a card without power/heat issues.

 

[Warped]

It's going for $350ish right now.

really?? i was expecting double that! i can afford that right now, i havea 550W power supply so this would be idea. length may be a problem though

 

[Asus]

I thought they would be at 400. Cheaper than I thought. That's $100 less than the GTX 295 and without the high power consumption.
5870, 4800 X2, GTX 295...all those are 10.5" cards.
The 5850 will be a 9" card. (fit in most cases)

 

[Dinnesch]

I read some reviews, seems it compares pretty well to the GTX 295.
I think i'm going to put one of these in my new PC(which i'll buy in a few months) if the 'bang-for-buck'-ratio improves, it is currently very bad(which is usual when cards are just releases)

Warped: if it doesn't fit in your case just saw off a part of your HDD bracket, i know someone who did this to solve it.

 

[Asus]

Didn't the 4870 come out at $299 and the 4850 at $199? I remember I waited for the 4850 to hit ~$140 w/discount+MIR rebate. I'm betting prices will really shake up about the time Nvidia comes out with their card. I think they are taking advantage of the fact that a GTX 295 is $500 and no new DX11 card in sight. Too bad it couldn't be sooner.

 

[Dinnesch]

Didn't the 4870 come out at $299 and the 4850 at $199? I remember I waited for the 4850 to hit ~$140 w/discount+MIR rebate. I'm betting prices will really shake up about the time Nvidia comes out with their card. I think they are taking advantage of the fact that a GTX 295 is $500 and no new DX11 card in sight. Too bad it couldn't be sooner.

Yes that sucks, i think I'll just get a GTX 275 for my new PC because i also prefer Nvidia over ATI, and the 5870 is simply too expensive.

PS, how are you going to spend your 10.000th post?

 

[Ravioli]

Its always like this:
Nvidia releases monster GPU -->ATI waits 8 months then releases competing GPU for cheaper ---> Nvidia releases next monster GPU, bitch slapping ATI back to second place
Repeat infinity

http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15713/1/

The chip that we ended up calling GT300 has internal codename Fermi. The name might suit it well as Enrico Fermi was the chap that came up with the first nuclear reactor.

The new Nvidia chip is taped out and running, and we know that Nvidia showed it to some important people. The chip should be ready for very late 2009 launch. This GPU will also heavily concentrate on parallel computing and it will have bit elements on chip adjusted for this task. Nvidia plans to earn a lot of money because of that.

The chip supports GDDR5 memory, has billions of transistors and it should be bigger and faster than Radeon HD 5870. The GX2 dual version of card is also in the pipes. It's well worth noting that this is the biggest architectural change since G80 times as Nvidia wanted to add a lot of instructions for better parallel computing.

oh man im good

 

[Krynn72]

Let me finish quoting that article for you.

The gaming part is also going to be fast but we won’t know who will end up faster in DirectX 11 games until we see the games. The clocks will be similar or very close to one we've seen at ATI's DirectX 11 card for both GPU and memory but we still don't know enough about shader count and internal structure to draw any performance conclusions.

So whats it mean when they say they're focusing on parallel computing? Apparently it doesnt mean anything for gaming.

 

[Ravioli]

Apparently it doesnt mean anything for gaming.

 

[Gunner]

I thought they would be at 400. Cheaper than I thought. That's $100 less than the GTX 295 and without the high power consumption.
5870, 4800 X2, GTX 295...all those are 10.5" cards.
The 5850 will be a 9" card. (fit in most cases)

Would it fit in an antec 900? And would a corsair 620 psu be enough?

 

[Asus]

You quote fudzilla so I don't mind quoting semiaccurate (Charlie Demerjian)
GT300 yields under 2%

Its always like this:
Nvidia releases monster GPU -->ATI waits 8 months then releases competing GPU for cheaper ---> Nvidia releases next monster GPU, bitch slapping ATI back to second place
Repeat infinity

http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/15713/1/

The chip that we ended up calling GT300 has internal codename Fermi. The name might suit it well as Enrico Fermi was the chap that came up with the first nuclear reactor.

The new Nvidia chip is taped out and running, and we know that Nvidia showed it to some important people. The chip should be ready for very late 2009 launch. This GPU will also heavily concentrate on parallel computing and it will have bit elements on chip adjusted for this task. Nvidia plans to earn a lot of money because of that.

The chip supports GDDR5 memory, has billions of transistors and it should be bigger and faster than Radeon HD 5870. The GX2 dual version of card is also in the pipes. It's well worth noting that this is the biggest architectural change since G80 times as Nvidia wanted to add a lot of instructions for better parallel computing.

oh man im good

Nvidia better hope it's faster than the 5870...
The 5870 is the mid-high part. Not the top of the line for ATI. That goes to the 5870 X2 coming this fall ($500 600?). It may be faster than the X2 but it may be basically pointless to customers because it will be $$$.
Just like no one bought the GTX 280 @ $600 when the 4870 came out at $300 and just a few frames below. That's ATI's strategy. Not aiming for the top of the top where there is less than a thousand units sold but just below where the performance is still there but without the insane prices.

I have no clue how the GT300 will perform but base on things in the past big architectural changes for bigger are usually not better. But rather are power hungry and make no profit for the company. (Big chips are expensive to make and hard to squeeze out a profit, especially when the competitor is making lower power small chips and is able to sell their cards for less and still make a better profit.)
Do you know what ATI's HD2900 was? I just referenced it in a post above. A bigger chip with many more transistors and more parallel computing. What was it? A flop for gamers. The way the paragraph is worded regarding more parallel design seems to refer to making it excel at GPU computing (which has nothing to do with gaming/video but making the GPU do CPU type stuff).
Although going from DDR3 to DDR5 with higher clock speeds automatically gives better speeds in games with no change in code needed (ATI already has DDR5 in the 4800).

Would it fit in an antec 900? And would a corsair 620 psu be enough?

Did a search and people were saying it should fit as long as you don't have your hard drive in front of the GPU.
I know when I was looking for that answer with my P180 case people were saying you had to remove the top hard drive cage to fit GPUs longer than 9".

If you have this corsair PSU it should run perfectly fine.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139002

 

[Iced_Eagle]

Let me finish quoting that article for you.



So whats it mean when they say they're focusing on parallel computing? Apparently it doesnt mean anything for gaming.

aka physics on the GPU. So, yes, it does mean something for gaming. However, as of now not a whole lot of games support this (instead doing most things on the CPU), but with DirectCompute in DX11, Nvidia will be in a great position to support the "next-gen" of games that use DX11 and its feature set correctly.

So basically, it will probably have the same, if not better, graphics performance as ATI's card, but at the same time, opening a whole new set of doors for other possibilities on the card. Very cool stuff, but this is all speculation until Nvidia actually shows something

 

[Krynn72]

Forgive my arrogance, but isnt the GPU pretty well loaded with tasks already? I don't see how taking away tasks from an underused CPU and putting them on an overworked GPU would help. Dont most CPUs not get used fully in most games?

 

[Asus]

The whole gpu computing thing doing CPU tasks is not for when the GPU is already being used. But like say you want to encode a video (something a CPU would do, similar to encoding a MP3). A high end GPU can do it faster than the newest Intel quad core CPU OCed...
But you are limited to what software has been coded to tap the GPU for that function.

When they talk about making a more parallel GPU their target is the GPU computing and not gamers. It could make physics better depending on how their physics functions. Now if they said they were beefing up shader count or instructions then that would be for gamers and physics.

 

[Asus]

So they have some reviews for the 5850, the little brother in the high end.
For $260 you get better performance than Nvidia's GTX 285 ($360+).

I wish Nvidia was launching their DX11 card sooner. Then we'd have the price drops of this past generation where the 4850 was at $160 within a couple months of launch (after rebate). Then the 5850 would be even a better deal with new competition.

That said, I've got enough power with my 4850.

 

[Quixoticism]

That would be nice if we could see nVidia's offering soon.

I think for someone building a new comp AMD's(lol, almost posted ATI) new offerings look like a great choice but like you said, those with at least a 4850 are better off waiting or just going for crossfire if they want better performance.

 

[Asus]

Even though AMD is the company, the GPUs are still sold and branded as ATI.