5850 a decent upgrade from a GTX260?

[marley82]

The 5850 will only get better with newer drivers, In the coming months when dx11 games are released it will be a very worth while upgrade I think. I'd go for it.

 

[Rroff]

On a related note - was playing with the 5870 I put into someones PC on my KVM last night - can't do direct performance comparisions as the CPU in his is significantly faster than mine... but couple of things I noticed...

While you probably wouldn't notice the difference without directly compare and contrasting like I was doing with the KVM - the 16x AF moire was noticeably nicer on the 5870 in the same scene switching between them... I wouldn't have even noticed it tho if I hadn't been switching directly between them.

Couple of games specially those on the crysis engine feel a little more responsive/smoother on roughly the same framerate on the 5870 compared to my SLI setup - might be a consideration for those wanting to play ArmA 2 as well - tho that game still felt laggy input wise it was much reduced.

While its probably some what a personal thing - I still need higher levels of AA on the ATI cards to not perceive jaggies ingame, this could also be partly due to the different color levels on the ATI cards which tend to have a brighter more saturated look.

Performance wise there was no real common ground... either one or the other card(s) would be quite a bit faster depending on the game/settings. Specially with the CPU difference its not unexpected.

 

[Axil]

On a related note - was playing with the 5870 I put into someones PC on my KVM last night - can't do direct performance comparisions as the CPU in his is significantly faster than mine... but couple of things I noticed...

While you probably wouldn't notice the difference without directly compare and contrasting like I was doing with the KVM - the 16x AF moire was noticeably nicer on the 5870 in the same scene switching between them... I wouldn't have even noticed it tho if I hadn't been switching directly between them.

Couple of games specially those on the crysis engine feel a little more responsive/smoother on roughly the same framerate on the 5870 compared to my SLI setup - might be a consideration for those wanting to play ArmA 2 as well - tho that game still felt laggy input wise it was much reduced.

While its probably some what a personal thing - I still need higher levels of AA on the ATI cards to not perceive jaggies ingame, this could also be partly due to the different color levels on the ATI cards which tend to have a brighter more saturated look.

Performance wise there was no real common ground... either one or other other card(s) would be quite a bit faster depending on the game/settings. Specially with the CPU difference its not unexpected.

Interesting you said that about the AA Rroff as I sort of agree but rate the ATI solution better as I have always found that though the jaggies are least apparent on the same setting on nV rather than ATI the image on NV has aways looked more smeared to me as opposed to a crisper more defined image on the ATi. I expect that is done to algorithm diffence though that being said I find the new AA algorith employed in the HD5800 series to be better than both nV's current and previous Ati renditions

 

[Greebo]

22% difference over all resolutions... baring in mind that most 260GTX will overclock 20-25%... even poor ones will do 15-20% OC... I think that puts it in the same ballpark unless you can get a good OC on the 5850.

Taking your 20-25% overclock on a gtx260, most 5850 will do 30%+ overclock therefore overclocked the 5850 will be more than 22% faster.

 

[Rroff]

Not worth it... overclock the 260GTX or Upgrade to a 5870... only way its worth getting a 5850 is if you can guarantee around 30-35% overclock on it... otherwise framerates are mostly still in the same ballpark - even tho the 5850 is faster.

Dunno why people keep on repeating what I've already said...

 

[Greebo]

Dunno why people keep on repeating what I've already said...

Cause we love you

I will say that new, the 5850 is worth the money over the gtx260. If you are looking at upgrading you won't get 120% increase in performance, more like 30% so not worth the money.

But then I wanted a new toy and it will only get better with new driver releases plus it has dx11.

 

[gurusan]

cant believe i missed your 260 in the mm for 85. damn

My 3870 is dying on me downclocked to 700mhz and still freezing sometimes...not to mention even at stock speeds it didn't do the best at 2048x1152

 

[Greebo]

cant believe i missed your 260 in the mm for 85. damn

It was up there for a week without being sold

Your loss

 

[pieman109]

cant believe i missed your 260 in the mm for 85. damn

My 3870 is dying on me downclocked to 700mhz and still freezing sometimes...not to mention even at stock speeds it didn't do the best at 2048x1152

Nevermind guru, you can have my 260 when I flog it shortly

 

[LeJosh]

Couple of games specially those on the crysis engine feel a little more responsive/smoother on roughly the same framerate

Might have been due to the minimum framerates, as I've heard they're quite higher than previous cards. Going by the 5870 that is. Unless it stayed like that framerate all the time the my point is moot.

 

[Rroff]

I will say that new, the 5850 is worth the money over the gtx260.

If you don't have one or other of the cards already then yeah deffinatly.

Might have been due to the minimum framerates, as I've heard they're quite higher than previous cards. Going by the 5870 that is. Unless it stayed like that framerate all the time the my point is moot.

Dunno but if anything the SLI setup was putting up higher min framerates (in most of the situations where this was noticeable) - I think its just slightly higher input lag that can happen with SLI.

 

[kylew]

Its more like 50% though in resolutions that matter from looking at those results. That site for me is one of the worst to get a comparison on cards.

So very true, over all percentages of performance makes cards look worse than they are.

According to them a 4870X2 is around 25% faster than a GTX285, in reality we all know the number is much higher.

It doesn't take in to account things like messed up drivers, bugs or games that have been gimped to perform well only on certain hardware.

Like dead space for example, that gets around 2x the performance on an NV card than the performance equivalent ATi card, that's gonna sway the overall percentage numbers quite a bit.

 

[Lightnix]

22% difference over all resolutions... baring in mind that most 260GTX will overclock 20-25%... even poor ones will do 15-20% OC... I think that puts it in the same ballpark unless you can get a good OC on the 5850.

Actually, shouldn't the 5850 be about 28% faster than the GTX 260, given the GTX 260 is shown as 22% slower?

Edit: Although I do wish they'd remove the original far cry from their benchmarks. More or less every card can run the game at stupidly high FPS and all it serves to do is give Nvidia a couple of spare percentage points for no readily apparent reason.

 

[Rroff]

The exact percentages don't really matter...

If you look at benchmarks over a range of GPUs the 5850 is the next card up to "break away" from the pack the 260GTX is in - but its still only just outside that "pack", the performance is in the same ballpark even if it is on the upper boundary - so as a "decent" upgrade from a 260GTX it doesn't really go very far... now if your considering buying one or other card from new then theres no contest - but thats another story.