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5850 vs 5870 - My Results & Opinions

Excellent post.

At least I know how far my card will clock (the op knows what I mean ;)).

For the price I paid for this card I am not going to complain about its performance :D

EDIT: Just ran a quick Vantage benchmark with the HD5870 @ stock and my scores came out basically identical to the ops (given a margin of error). My cpu is clocked 200mhz slower (otherwise identical) and the rest of my setup is pretty much identical.

OP - Do you have the Unique heaven benchmark?
 
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Very interesting post and thanks for taking the time to do it.

I would, however, take issue with your definition of a "large" difference between the stock cards. In my mind, 20% isn't a large difference at all, especially when you're paying a whopping 50% more for the privilege. Even if you're not overclocking, the 5870 looks poor value compared to the 5850 unless you really need the extra performance the 5870 offers :)
 
Ok just ran the DX11 Unique Heaven benchmark if anyone is interested:

Spec:

Core i7 920 @ 3.6Ghz
6GB DDR3 memory @ 1440mhz
HD5870 @ Stock
Vista X64 SP2

Settings (for comparison)

1680x1050
DX11
Shaders - High
Tessellation - Enabled
Anisotrophy - 4
AA - Off
Full Screen - Yes

Average FPS - 40.4624

Average FPS @ 925/5000 - 43.4 (7.3% increase for a 9% clock speed increase - seems roughly in line with the AA results)



Same settings but with 4x AA and 16x Anisotrophic filtering:

Average FPS - 30.8

Average FPS @ 925/5000 - 33.1FPS

Seems a slight improvement in raw terms but it is a 7.5% increase for a 9% clock speed increase (roughly linear). Increasing the memory clock doesn't seem to have any affect.
 
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Great post, very informative, this will influence my next purchase as i have been looking at these for a while.
 
Unfortunately I no longer own the 5870, and most of the benchmarks I took at the time were not recorded. All I have are Vantage, 3DMark06, and Crysis. I may post 3DMark06 results tomorrow, if I have time to bench my 5850 (I only received the card today).
 
555BUK said:
Unfortunately I no longer own the 5870, and most of the benchmarks I took at the time were not recorded. All I have are Vantage, 3DMark06, and Crysis. I may post 3DMark06 results tomorrow, if I have time to bench my 5850 (I only received the card today).
Click to expand...

Run the Unique heaven benchmarks as I have done above (using the same settings). Our pcs seem quite evenly matched so the only difference appears to be the GPU.

From what I can tell the results seem to increase almost linearly with the clock speed increase (which makes sense).
 
Unique Heaven benches below. See original post for full details. Thanks to oweneades for the 5870 results.

5850 @ Stock clocks 34.2fps
5870 @ Stock clocks 40.4624fps
difference 18.31%

5850 @ 5870 clocks 39.8fps
5870 @ Stock clocks 40.4624fps
difference 1.02%

5850 @ 925/1200 clocks 42.3fps
5870 @ 925/1250 clocks 43.4fps
difference 1.03%
 
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This deserves to be stickied. (Or made part of some collection of stickies)

To put an end to the 5850 vs 5870 threads.

Cheers for putting in the effort to get the figures up;)
 

Out of interest what volts does your 5850 need to run at 1100/1300? I run my 5870 at 1000/1300 with 1.2v. But even when using 1.35v with msi afterburner i cant get it stable at 1100/1300
 
555BUK Thank you very much for taking the time and effort in producing this excellent comparison.

Another vote here that this should be stickied.

The results reaffirm that I made the right choice in going for a 5850 considering the difference in price.
 
Raves said:
Well done. Confirms the findings posted over at xtremesystems some months ago.

At the same clocks the 5870 out-performs the 5850, but not by the theoretical (based on shader count) margin.
Click to expand...

It's basically what was said in the other thread but without the first 2 (or so) pages of silly responses.

So back to the original question.... If those shaders are being underutilised, what is bottlenecking them? Memory bandwidth? I see less difference between them than expected for OpenCL use too; iirc only some (320 ish i think, i'm not 100% sure) stream processors are used for compute operations so that could be why.
 
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Hoodlum said:
It's basically what was said in the other thread but without the first 2 (or so) pages of silly responses.

So back to the original question.... If those shaders are being underutilised, what is bottlenecking them? Memory bandwidth? I see less difference between them than expected for OpenCL use too; iirc only some (320 ish i think, i'm not 100% sure) stream processors are used for compute operations so that could be why.
Click to expand...

I doubt highly that it's a hardware issue, more likely a driver limitation or just how well the shader code is optimised to run on the hardware, we're testing old and first generation code after all.
 
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