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New Sapphire 5850 vs BFG 8800GTX OC Benchies :)

dlknight

dlknight

dlknight

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Smallbrook
Hello,

A short while ago I decided it was time to buy a new graphics card and give my mate Mortster back his trusty BFG 8800GTX that I have been borrowing for the last year or so.

I decided on a ATI Radeon 5850 after originally buying an XFX HD4890 from auction, unfortunately this card wasn't great (this may have been due to the non-reference design PCB) and I returned it to the seller (seller subsequently managed to get a full refund from the etailer it had originally been purchased from).

Just to clarify yes the 4890 results are dodgy and this appears to be because the card was from a bad batch of XFX cards made and sold in August 2009 - http://www.overclock.net/ati/634248-xfx-4890-bad-batch-discussion.html

So after this I was a bit dubious about buying another 4890, especially an XFX card so after looking at lots of reviews and also the price compared to cards from NVIDIA my heart was set on a 5850. I have always been a NVIDIA buyer but the quality of the 48** series cards has swayed me towards ATI.

My run of luck continued and after purchasing a Club 3D 5850 which lasted only 24 hours (refusing to POST) I received a replacement card from OCUK, a Sapphire HD5850.

Initial impressions are thumbs up, many thanks to OCUK for changing my RMA card to the Sapphire, think they were having issues getting stock of the Club 3D cards.

The image quality within Windows seems warmer and more natural than the impression the 8800 gave. Especially viewing TV recordings from my Mythtv box in VLC, I watched a few recordings of the Winter Olympics on the PC whilst doing other stuff and the colour and clarity of the BBC HD recordings was superb, it also seemed that some of the video processing was being offloaded to the GPU :) nice one ATI. NVIDIA have video processing in the form of VDPAU so was great to see that ATI are doing something similar.

One of the features I was keen on using is the ATI eyefinity feature as I have two Samsung 22" LCD's. After exploring the options within the Catalyst Manager I worked out that I needed to create a profile and then setup a display group within that profile. I duly did this then had a couple of hours play on MW2 in single player mode at 3360x1050 :), with only two monitors its a bit tricky having the crosshair in the centre but I managed to play and it didn't annoy me one bit.

In preperation for the new video card I had performed various benchies on the 8800 and when I had the 4890 I did the same benchies on that, so here are the final results tallied together along with some fancy graphs (cause I like playing).

Tests were performed on the following system:

  • ASUS P5Q-E Motherboard with Intel E6300 Conroe @ 3360MHz
  • 2 x 2GB OCZ Reaper HPC Edition
  • 2 x 250GB 7200rpm SATA drives in Raid 0
  • Windows 7 RC 64 Bit
  • NVIDIA Driver version 196.21
  • ATI Catalyst 10.1
  • Crysis 1.2.1
  • DiRT 2 Demo
  • Stalker Clearsky Benchmark

Crysis

4384268717_531f7cba1b_o.jpg


Results in Crysis kind of speak for themselves, as you can see on some of the results with 0xAA it appears there is a bottleneck which I am guessing is the CPU. Graphs below show the benefits of the 5850 slightly better than the table:





DiRT 2

4384268733_f499a08d9f_o.jpg


Results in DiRT 2 show the same bottleneck from the Crysis results above which again I am assuming is down to the CPU.

Online reviews/benchies showing similar results for my setup :) - http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,700780/Dirt-2-CPU-benchmarks-with-DirectX-9-and-DirectX-11-Phenom-doing-well-quad-cores-rule/Practice/

Stalker ClearSky Benchmark

4385035540_9c3d2f37bf_o.jpg


As you can see significant improvements are shown in the Stalker ClearSky Benchmark :)







Cheers
 
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Nice one - good to see these as my setup is similar except my CPU is the E6750 @3.3GHz - Hopefully my 5850 will arrive by the end of this week...
 
You should have made this into a review and entered it into the competition with comparing it to your old 8800 :)
 
*BUMP* readded the post, I removed it as though I could enter it in competition but would have to do a bit more work really :)
 
Looks good, I assume the differences between the 5850 and the other cards would be even bigger if the res was bumped up to 1920x1200?

Looking forward to getting a 5850 next week even more now! (upgrading from 8800GTS)
 
Not sure if anyone else has noticed the obvious flaws in the graphs - pretty poor.

The data however does do well to show how little gpu's have advanced since the 8800gtx was released back in 2006. with a average of around 1/3 improvement.
 
Flawed results, for a start you say dirt 2 runs in DX9 on the 5850 when it runs Dx11 at default, so I take it you edited the config file so it plays dx9 only? if that's the case you would be seeing 80-90fps even with your crappy CPU.

Crysis, why you run only high, thats' for the birds, run it at very high...:confused: a number of other dodgy looking results but CBA to go over them.
 
Blackbadger said:
Not sure if anyone else has noticed the obvious flaws in the graphs - pretty poor.
Click to expand...

Which flaws might they be then?

RavenXXX2 said:
Flawed results, for a start you say dirt 2 runs in DX9 on the 5850 when it runs Dx11 at default, so I take it you edited the config file so it plays dx9 only? if that's the case you would be seeing 80-90fps even with your crappy CPU.

Crysis, why you run only high, thats' for the birds, run it at very high...:confused: a number of other dodgy looking results but CBA to go over them.
Click to expand...

Erm yes I edited the config file and your point is?

80-90fps really? please provide the evidence to back your claims...

Again dodgy results, please elaborate...
 
Blackbadger said:
Not sure if anyone else has noticed the obvious flaws in the graphs - pretty poor.

The data however does do well to show how little gpu's have advanced since the 8800gtx was released back in 2006. with a average of around 1/3 improvement.
Click to expand...

If you take the time to delve deeper into the gap between the 8800 series of cards and this current generation you'll actually find that in real world gaming terms there is at times a 170% increase in performance. That to me says that there has been significant steps forward in the technology even when ignoring the DX11 aspect of the new cards.
 
Blackbadger said:
Not sure if anyone else has noticed the obvious flaws in the graphs - pretty poor.

The data however does do well to show how little gpu's have advanced since the 8800gtx was released back in 2006. with a average of around 1/3 improvement.
Click to expand...

you looking at the same results?

Ignore the cpu limited ones and there is even aa question as to whether 1680 x 1050 is still cpu limited to an extent, the 5850 on high details with aa is 100% faster in crysis and 80% in stalker.

not bad for a card which costs under £200 and is not top of the line.

If you compared the 8000gtx with today's top of the range card the difference would be more like 170% as stated.

It does prove though that if gaming at 1680 x 1050 or less you really don't need anything much more powerful than a 8800gtx or a 5770 if you want a modern card.
 
4890 results are very flawed, which makes me think the 5850 are too.

Just for comparision I was getting 55 fps in Crysis @ 1680x1050/High with my 5850. This was on a 3.4ghz Q9550, but since Crysis hardly uses multi-core processors, it's not going to make a huge difference.

Regardless of this though, a 4890 destroys a 8800GTX, so there's something wrong anyway.
 
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Greebo said:
It does prove though that if gaming at 1680 x 1050 or less you really don't need anything much more powerful than a 8800gtx or a 5770 if you want a modern card.
Click to expand...

Try playing crysis on very high, BFBC2, GTA4 and many other current and forthcoming titles and watch the cards you mentioned crumble at the stated rez, FFS it's not 800-600.
 
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