Upgrade 5870 to 580 worth it or not? + screen advice

[abercromb]

Hi all.

Just picking everyones brains here. I have the following card:

Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5870 1024MB GDDR5

As an avid gamer I am looking at the 580 as an upgrade. Anyone made that jump? Or can advise me if I will see much in the way of a noticeable increase in FPS.

I currently have a monitor just under 22 inches but will be moving to 24 or possibly 27 at a similar time. Any advice would be warmly welcomed (including links to a card and monitor if possible). Budget is going to be £600-£700 for both.

Thanks

 

[iamtheoneneo]

for what reason exactly? what game possibly makes use of the extra power? is it REALLY worth it given the current state of gaming in general?

are you playing the witcher 2 because thats the only game in recent years thats even remotely attempted to use pc hardware to the max.

or is this for e-pee status?

 

[~>Dg<~]

would at least wait till sept oct see how bf3 performs first .

your card is hardly slow

 

[abercromb]

I play Age of conan online. It's a pretty hungry game and to be able to play now I have to turn many things down. Some of that is of course the coding, but from reports in game a 580 is going to give me a 10-15 fps improvement at max settings. That's enough to switch them back on. But if there is another generation of cards coming soon then I can of course wait.

 

[mewhome]

if you want 580, buy the 3gb version

 

[chief barker]

if you want 580, buy the 3gb version

Why are you upgrading your 2 5870s ?.

 

[Randomface74]

I'm running a 5870 on a 24"
Performance certainly isn't a problem.

I'm considering replacing mine for a 580 because of catalyst woes.
But if your card is stable, I wouldn't bother replacing it yet.

 

[setter]

I wouldnt consider buying a card just now for bf3. Better waiting till the game is out and see how it runs. Probably be new cards out by that time as well.

 

[girafferider]

for what reason exactly? what game possibly makes use of the extra power? is it REALLY worth it given the current state of gaming in general?

are you playing the witcher 2 because thats the only game in recent years thats even remotely attempted to use pc hardware to the max.

or is this for e-pee status?

And even the witcher's perfectly playable with a 5870 and everything maxed (cept ubersampling of course). Don't expect you'll have any problems with bf3 either. There's really no need to upgrade that card this early

 

[jimjam81]

I did this upgrade a few months ago, Asus 5870 1Gb to MSI GTX580 Lighting.

It's a good upgrade but not a wow upgrade.

I don't get the shadow flicker anymore and the card is fairly quiet, I would estimate I got around 40% fps increase. I have not even overcloked the Lightning anymore because it destroys any game at 1680x1050.... However my 5870 was not really struggling either.

I just wanted to upgrade to try Nvdia out after years of ATi and also to get fairly decent return on my 5870 before it goes worthless.

Metro 2033 you can get a good framerate of around 35fps+ with everything on.

If you have the cash to burn the by all means go for it but if you 5870 is coping fine at the moment with the games you play then you may aswell wait till the next generation GPU's.

 

[harmony]

The 28nm cards were scheduled to be released Q3 or Q4 this year.

 

[Marine-RX179]

I play Age of conan online. It's a pretty hungry game and to be able to play now I have to turn many things down. Some of that is of course the coding, but from reports in game a 580 is going to give me a 10-15 fps improvement at max settings. That's enough to switch them back on. But if there is another generation of cards coming soon then I can of course wait.

I'm suspecting the poor frame rate you are getting could be more due to CPU bottleneck than 5870 being not fast enough. You should check the GPU usage of your 5870 when the frame rate drop to the ground.

I give you an example...
I've overclocked my 5850 from 725MHz to 900MHz, so pretty much around as fast as a 5870. I'm currently playing on Global Agenda, and in enclosed area, my GPU will be at 99% usage, and I'm getting frame rate from 60~120fps...but once I got to open area where I can see the map in distance plus lots of other characters on screen, my frame rate drop to around 23fps~30fps, while the GPU usage dropped from 99% down to 70~90%. So it is quite clear the graphic card is being bottlenecked by the CPU. And the annoying thing is that while my Q6600 at 3.6GHz is still quite capable, the game is not well written to use Quad-core CPU, and it is only using 2-3 cores.

If you have a reasonbly fast graphic card and is struggling in mmorpg or online game which the game texture don't seem particular high or detailed and still getting poor frame rate, majority of the time it is due to (game imposed) CPU bottleneck.

What CPU are you using by the way?