When
the covers were slipped off the HD 5870 last week, what emerged was the new champ in graphics performance that could also boast a pretty aggressive price to performance ratio. The only question left for many was whether the slightly hamstrung version of the
same Cypress chip, the HD 5850, would be able to offer even better value for money. With a suggested retail price of $259, lower power consumption under load and a shorter circuit board to cram into your case, the 5850 certainly appeals to the more sensible end of the graphics card market. All we really need to say is that Editor's Choice awards rained down upon this thing like they were going out of style -- so take a deep breath and hit the links below to plunge into the bar chart-intensive analysis.
Read - Hot Hardware review
Read - HardOCP review
Read - Hexus review
Read - PC Perspective review
Read - Tech Report review
Read - Legit Reviews review
posted Sep 30th 2009 3:42AM
GOOOOooo!!! AMD/ATI! So I can get better stuff from NVidia too....
its over, nvidia is finished.
nvidia's gpus are not built to last
With how I've been burned from my 7950 gx2 and 8800 gtx both dieing a heat related death, I believe this may have to be my next card. I've always been a Nvidia fan too.
It's getting very annoying how almost all gaming-focused video cards these days take up 2 slots.
What's even more annoying however, is when you ask people what the best single slot video card's available today, they end up giving you a list of 2-slot cards... and then they're like "Oh... I thought you meant one PCI-e slot connection"... and I'm like "Yeah? Show me a card with 2 PCI-e connections you dumba**!"
When the HD 4870 was released, I opted for the single slot HD 4850 which has served me well but I feel that they no longer care for producing single slot cards. :<
NOOOOOOOOOOOOO THIS IS HORRIBLEEE SO FARR...IF NVIDIA DIES THEN ATI WILL TORTURE US WITH HIGH PRICES.
Running a 5870 right now... Completely destroys every other single GPU graphics card EVER. Almost as good as the GTX 295 despite it being a single GPU.
It's safe to say that ATI just gave Nvidia a serious run for their money.
True it's impressive, but it's not like nVidia won't fight back.
The HD 5850 is a bit of a lackluster IMHO, exchanges blows with the GTX275 and for slightly higher price. I fail to see where the joy is coming from. Not that it's bad to have competition from ATI, I'm just not all impressed with the HD 5870 little brother.
Yeah polo, try again, except for PC Perspective(operator error?) every review including Anand and 3D guru, have the 5850 beating/equaling the 285 for less money.
Thanks for playing though.
Sold.
Good to hear about this being fast and relatively inexpensive. But, I guess I'll wait for a while since my old and weak GTX 280 does a decent job chewing games at 2560x1600 ;)
Other than that, thanks for many reviews in one place :)
Makes me feel good seeing ATI back on top. Go Canada.
ATI still works out of Ontario right?
How is the linux support for ATi cards these days? Last I remember it was a nightmare if you used a tool from your distro or even got the drivers directly from them. Anyone?
Nvidia is still ahead in terms of linux driver development. ATI's own OpenCL and VDAPU implementations have yet to fabricate.
ATI's Linux driver set at this point is a more solid bet than Nvidia's. The 9.8 drivers that I'm using right now play 3d games flawlessly, and they weren't hard to install, I just had to enable the RPMFusion repo. Not only do I think their 3d proprietary drivers are at least on par with Nvidia's, but the open source driver shows a lot of potential.
Linux users really shouldn't be going with Nvidia anymore.
I was wondering too about the state of ATI's Linux support -- so that's good news.
With drivers I expect the 5870 to surpass the current crop of dual chip cards, this wont be too far behind
and can I ask what the point of a gaming card for linux is?
Spinning around your compuz cube with blinding speed?
http://www.semiaccurate.com/2009/09/15/nvidia-gt300-yeilds-under-2/
Teehee.
The problem with that is, Charlie hates the green team so much, that if Nvidia cured cancer he'd bitch that they should have done it decades ago and should have cured AIDS instead.
is it a bird, is it a plane, no it's the newly released scorching fast 5870, guarunteed to blow your socks off
Nvidia's headquarters is right down my street, as much as i'd love to support my local economy....I have to admit that this gives the biggest bang for my buck and by the benchmarks, the 5870 crossfired can outperform the gtx295 sli. Good job amd ati
Its all well and good that its the best / one of the best graphics cards on the market but im sure NVidia are gonna have reply soon enough. Their dx11 card is due out oct or nov isnt it? Then we'll see which is really better!
nope, there a lot of chatter about Q1 2010 launch.
It's supposed to launch in Nov. When you'll actually be able to buy one? I'd guess sometime between then and Feb.
That would be a tough call for nVidia to answer. By the time, 58xx card would drop in price below $200.
The crucial difference between nVidia and ATI is that former always concentrates on higher-end marker, while latter - on mass market.
5850 runs most games at 50fps/higher in resolution 1920x1200/higher. That is where mass market is now. But that also stretches right into higher end territory.
Just like it happened in CPU market - everyone wants to have fastest CPU, yet what the point if 2yo s/h chip run perfectly all your games? - same happening now in GPU market now. And it would stay that way unless display resolution wouldn't increase drastically. (Though with Eyefinity ATI apparently prepared even for that.)
Unless nVidia's next gen starts at $200 (a huge surprise; change of business model) I do not see them catching up with ATI.
Liking the ATI logo on the fan and the AMD logo on the board.
This is a reference design. Most reviews of 58x0 were done with such cards provided by AMD. But it is not sold :(
That actually raised my concern that cards sold by ASUS/Sapphire/etc might differ from the reference design. At least in one area I'm quite interested: noise emission of the fan.
Till I can get a mid range card with a huge passive heatsink on it, I'm not interested.
Right, now if ATI/AMD can bring their linux drivers on par with Nvidia I am sold
there going open source
Looks like I've found my next graphics card (on a X1950 atm). Now to decide what CPU/mobo to get, and I can get a fresh start on Windows 7...
They don't mention it in the reviews, but these cards also support HD audio : )
These cards actually process the audio as well(through HDMI anyway). So it's a two in one.
My next card.
Oh. AMD/ATI really is hell bent on hammering and destroying Nvidia aren't they? I mean... releasing DX11 this early. I can expect nearly all DX11 games the next two year to be performance-biased towards ATI cards because of this. I'm sure the game developers have already received their DX11 toys from ATI. So, any word on Nvidia's counter? They've been hurt hard since the HD 48xx came out. Despite the GTX cards having absurdly large (in other words, much more costly) dies, they're only slightly faster than their ATI counterparts and they're selling for much less than what Nvidia intended. If I remember correctly, the GTX 280 was supposed to sell for $650+ but after a... can I say "sneak attack"? from ATI, they slashed it to $450 in a blink of an eye. I wonder how they can keep up with this imbalanced economies of scale.
No sneak attack. ATI announced they would beat Nvidia to DX11 months ago.
I was referring to the HD 48xx series of cards. They came after Nvidia released their GTX 260 and 280 at absurdly high prices thinking they could remain unchallenged after ATI's previous attempt (HD 38xx cards were trounced still by the G92-based cards, like the wildly popular 8800 GT).
Microsoft has a pretty tight relationship with AMD/ATi with the 360. MS got burned pretty bad from Nvidia with Xbox 1. So it's probably safe to say that MS/DX11/AMD-ATi are a driving relationship.
Seeing the 5000 series makes me curious what they are going to put into the Xbox 360 successor 3 years down the line, considering Xenos was way ahead of all other GPUs on the market at the time.
Interesting point regarding the X-Box, hadn't really thought of that. I'll be picking up a 5850 in any case, to replace my 4850, which I'm very happy with but will hand down to my brother. Arma II is a graphical hog, I need all I can get. The 4850 was my first ATI card in a while; the only thing I prefer about nVidia at this point is their drivers, in both Windows and Linux. ATI's always do feel rather unpolished.
ati still doesnt have whql drivers for win7, nvidia already does.
I feel like AMD is able to justify their processor line performance by having awesome graphics cards. And i like it.
Did you see the eyefinity test video at hardocp? when he connects a display via an apple HDMI adapter the damn thing bluescreens when he tries triple screen, and then he says the adapter cable is known to be a POS but come on, it shows how ATI's drivers bluescreen when confused and no matter what kind of cable you connect a monitor with the driver should not bluescreen an OS.
I experienced it myself, the ATI driver having issues if the monitor doesn't supply info about itself, and countless other issues on xp64 (including coring on boot with several driver versions) since ATI has no idea what they are doing when working on 64bit windows (including vista64)
Not that this isn't a good card though, just be prepared to work for it and browsing forums for fixes.
But the same is true for nvidia just as much, so there's no escaping it.
this is what worries me about ATI. Do they still farm their drivers out to the lowest bidder? My first two ATI cards (years ago) were driver hell. Shipping drivers buggy, updates liable to break things, etc. I have been an Nvidia user for years since and have seldom experienced more than quirks on driver updates.//
Like they said, the Apple adapter is a known POS... If Eyefinity does even decent sales, and if the 2GB-version of the 5870 is indeed going to come in only a 6-slot MiniDisplayPort-packing version, then maybe we can get some quality, non-Apple adapters.
And hopefully they won't be white!