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Not a great 5870 experience

imashination

imashination

imashination

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Joined
2 Oct 2003
Posts
106
Location
St Albans
Just thought I'd write up my experience with this card if anyones interested. Please, no flames.

Just so you know where im coming from. I work in cinema 4d all day and do a bit of gaming, left 4 dead and WoW mostly. Current machine is an 8 core 3ghz mac, 16 gigs ram, 8800gt running windows 7 pro. I bought a sapphire 5870 so I could turn some AA and crank up the game settings, and to work a bit faster in my 3d app.

It started off ok, its certainly faster but the bugs quickly started to pee me off. Everything i'll list is compared to the old geforce card.

Every time an opengl or directx 3d window initialises, the screen flickers. Some old garbage from the previous 3d app will flash up for a fraction of a second before its wiped out and it shows what its supposed to. In games this isnt terrible, but you get it every time you alt tab to the desktop. In 3d apps its an utter pain, because youre flicking between the main 3d view and the 4 top, side, front views every few seconds. It does it in c4d, xsi and blender; switching images in photoshop also does it.

Everything randomly goes dark after a few hours of use. Whether its gaming or working, all 3d content will just spontaneously go dark. left 4 dead is like playing with the flashlight off, 3d work is unusable because now i cant light anything, if photoshop has opengl enabled, all images go dark. Restarting the machine is the only remedy for this

On top of this, just general glitchiness in all 3d apps which is 100% completely fine on my old geforce card. Random ghosts of 3d objects left behind in views, wireframes flickering, generally its just a bit naff.

Overall if youre only doing fullscreen gaming then youll probably be fine with the card, if you move from app to app, alt tab around then, youve been warned. Methinks I'll go throw it up on some auction site :-/
 
imashination said:
Every time an opengl or directx 3d window initialises, the screen flickers. Some old garbage from the previous 3d app will flash up for a fraction of a second before its wiped out and it shows what its supposed to. In games this isnt terrible, but you get it every time you alt tab to the desktop. In 3d apps its an utter pain, because youre flicking between the main 3d view and the 4 top, side, front views every few seconds. It does it in c4d, xsi and blender; switching images in photoshop also does it.

Everything randomly goes dark after a few hours of use. Whether its gaming or working, all 3d content will just spontaneously go dark. left 4 dead is like playing with the flashlight off, 3d work is unusable because now i cant light anything, if photoshop has opengl enabled, all images go dark. Restarting the machine is the only remedy for this

On top of this, just general glitchiness in all 3d apps which is 100% completely fine on my old geforce card. Random ghosts of 3d objects left behind in views, wireframes flickering, generally its just a bit naff.
Click to expand...

I have a few of them issues. But not the screen darkening or the Photoshop CS4 issues. And games have mostly been ok (i've tried over 40 so far) but there is small graphical glitches in 2 - 3 games that were not there on my NV cards.

And any drivers i've tried do not fix this. But i've built over 200 machines in over a decade, with all types of configurations, graphics cards and onboard graphics, and you know what?... i can safely say that ATI's drivers are just not as good as NV's. Regardless of what anyone says on here who's owned a few (if that) cards, my own vast experience speaks for itself.

People also see the monthly release of ATI drivers as a good thing, but it's certainly not (even Anandtech and other sites has mentioned this) 30 days is simply not enough time to properly polish drivers, which is constantly demonstrated.


Theres also some other 5xxx series bugs i'd like to add :
1) Overclocking, even by 1MHz, will make my second monitor flicker when dragging windows.
2) When forcing AA/AF/Vsync in CCC theres quite a lot of games where it will do nothing at all, where as with NV, it would often work.


I would never use an ATI card for 3D modelling/rendering work as you do. I hardly do that stuff these days, mostly just graphics, art, website design, and gaming, so luckily my 5870's cut it for these uses.
 
mdjmcnally said:
Wonder if anything to do with the fact that running a non-Mac card in the Mac Pro. Can I ask if the 8800GT is the Mac version?
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That was my fist thought, I was under the impression you needed the mac version of a card.

Also, what PSU does a mac pro have? This is a long shot though, what you're experiencing doesn't seem to be a power issue.
 
Absolute latest drivers, theyre still the latest as of today (6th nov)

A mac is a pc, theres no difference these days. EFI mobo, 16x pcie slots, sata drives, ddr ram etc. While testing Ive used a regular 8800GTS pc card without a single hitch. You can use any pc components in the mac, the issue is, you can no longer boot into OSX with a non-mac gfx card. But thats fine for me. The mac has a nice chunky 1k psu, there are 2 dedicated 6 pin pcie gfx card power cables.

I got it as part payment for a previous job, no, I wouldnt normally have bought it as a pc. I've built my own previous dozen machines or so, but if someone dumps an 8 core liquid cooled xeon on you, youre not gonna turn it down ;)

Mr B: yes, id forgotten about the flickering after clocking. I run 2560 + 1920 screens and the second screen would occasionally jump down 100 pixels and then pop back up again. Usually when alt tabbing from a full screen app on the main screen.

Dont get me wrong its a nice fast card and a decent price. Its just on the wrong side of the speed/glitchiness ratio for my liking. Its an italian sports car essentially.

Well its sold now anyway, at least the lack of supply has treated me well, sold it for the same price I paid for it :) I think ill hold on for whatever NV releases next
 
MR.B said:
I can safely say that ATI's drivers are just not as good as NV's. Regardless of what anyone says on here who's owned a few (if that) cards, my own vast experience speaks for itself.

People also see the monthly release of ATI drivers as a good thing, but it's certainly not (even Anandtech and other sites has mentioned this) 30 days is simply not enough time to properly polish drivers, which is constantly demonstrated.
Click to expand...

+1. Could not agree with you more on this point, very well put.

As this person mentioned, It seems like a Driver issue, I hope you can get this sorted as work is more important than gaming. Best bet would be to phone the company itself and give them the exact details and specs of your computer and tell them your problem. They should be able to help you out in some way that makes it a bit more pleasurably to be using that card.
 
For opengl based 3d apps on Ati cards, you would need to download ati tray tools & set the buffer transfer mode to block transfer iirc. Either that or set the buffer depth to 16bits... or both. Can't remember exactly right now, but will look it up shortly ( used to need this with project messiah to stop the interface flickering in opengl )
 
imashination said:
Mr B: yes, id forgotten about the flickering after clocking. I run 2560 + 1920 screens and the second screen would occasionally jump down 100 pixels and then pop back up again. Usually when alt tabbing from a full screen app on the main screen.t
Click to expand...

Exact same monitor setup as me aswell.
If i was you, stick with the 8800GT you had before (if you have not sold it), and wait for NV's new cards early next year. Being as they will be CPGPU cards that can do a lot more than just gaming, apps you use like Cinema4D could take advantage of these capabilities in future updates.
 
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