5870 advice.

[davedudes]

Ill be getting a 5870 in a few weeks and just would like to know, what kind of performance gain I could get in BC2 for example, here is my current system.

Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 4.05GHz 8Gb Kingston Hyper Ram
XFX 4890 WD SATA Black 640GIG HD OCZ 700W PSU

Cheers

 

[RavenXXX2]

Expect substantial performance gains over a 4890 and availability of DX11, results below are from early march so expect even better performance now, with the optimization in ATI drivers and in the updates for BC2.

http://www.techspot.com/article/255-battlefield-bad-company2-performance/page5.html

 

[Marine-RX179]

Ill be getting a 5870 in a few weeks and just would like to know, what kind of performance gain I could get in BC2 for example, here is my current system.

Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 4.05GHz 8Gb Kingston Hyper Ram
XFX 4890 WD SATA Black 640GIG HD OCZ 700W PSU

Cheers

Hate to say this, but the E8400 would most likely bottleneck the 5870 in BFBC2 even with the overclock. Even your 4890 may be bottleneck a bit by the E8400. May be you should try to push the overclock to higher? It should increase the frame rate a bit.

Ideally, you should get a fast Quad-core (and overclock).

 

[RavenXXX2]

^^^^

Update: For those that were concerned about dual vs. quad-core CPU battle, here is a little more info...

The game appears to be using all four cores when available. Here we used a standard Core i7 920 processor running at 2.66GHz. Please note HyperThreading was disabled and a single Radeon HD 5850 graphics card was used. As you can see none of the cores are working very hard.

Here is the same Core i7 920 processor with two cores disabled as well as HyperThreading. As you can see neither core is maxed out, but the CPU utilization is much higher. So again, a decent dual core processor
such as a Core 2 Duo E8xxx or Phenom II X2 should be enough to get the most out of your graphics card in this game. While it is quad-core optimized, the game is not demanding enough on the CPU to warrant it based on what I have seen so far.

http://www.techspot.com/article/255-battlefield-bad-company2-performance/page7.html

 

[davedudes]

Hate to say this, but the E8400 would most likely bottleneck the 5870 in BFBC2 even with the overclock. Even your 4890 may be bottleneck a bit by the E8400. May be you should try to push the overclock to higher? It should increase the frame rate a bit.

Ideally, you should get a fast Quad-core (and overclock).

I have to stop you there, there is nothing wrong with my cpu at the moment, where do you get your info from? Because you just made me go lmao, no point in going for a quad core now, other people have said its ok for the upgrade, suspect info you have there.

 

[mattjd]

No point upgrading to quad core now. Just wait until more 6 cores come out or the 8 cores come out. The 2 core processors still have ayear or two left before it becomes obsolete.

 

[Marine-RX179]

I have to stop you there, there is nothing wrong with my cpu at the moment, where do you get your info from? Because you just made me go lmao, no point in going for a quad core now, other people have said its ok for the upgrade, suspect info you have there.

ok I might not be 100% certain about whether or not the E8400 would hold back the 4890 in BFBC2, but I can tell you for certain that it will bottleneck 5870 by a bit:

HD5870, 4GB Corsair 800Mhz DDR2, 4GB Corsair 1,600Mhz DDR3
Crysis (DirectX 10, 64-Bit, High) at 1,680x1,050

[email protected] (stock speed)=12-35fps
Q6600 [email protected]=24-45fps
[email protected] (stock speed)=19-36fps
E8400 [email protected]=27-48fps
Phenom II X4 965 BE (C3 stepping) @3.4Ghz (stock speed)=23-46fps
Phenom II X4 965 BE (C3 stepping) [email protected] =29-52fps
Core i5 [email protected] (stock speed)=20-50fps
Core i5 750 [email protected]

Frame rates in min, avg

(source: Custom PC Issue 078 March 2010, p41)

It is clear that the 5870 can go up to 33-57fps, but the [email protected] simply is not enough to push the 5870 to up there.

I guess I forgot to mention the point I actually wanted to make...a 5850 would be enough for your E8400. Sure you can go spend £80~£100 extra to get a 5870 instead, but don't say I didn't warn you that you might not be actually getting any extra performance over a 5850.

 

[daniel_bourton]

that is a really demanding game though so it doesnt really matter proven by the i5 in there it will always go up with a overclock in a game as cpu intensive as crysis is

 

[Marine-RX179]

that is a really demanding game though so it doesnt really matter proven by the i5 in there it will always go up with a overclock in a game as cpu intensive as crysis is

I'll include the figures for i7 as well:
HD5870, 6GB Corsair 1,600Mhz DDR3
Crysis (DirectX 10, 64-Bit, High) at 1,680x1,050
Core i7 [email protected] (stock speed): 35-57fps
Core i7 980X [email protected]: 35-57fps
Core i7 980X [email protected]: 35-57fps

(source: Custom PC Issue 080 May 2010, p39)

So basically the 5870 is GPU bound at average 57fps. If you look back at the [email protected], it's average frame rate is only at 48fps, which is 9fps (15.8% of 57fps) lower than the GPU bound of average 57fps. What this means is that the [email protected] is only using around 84.2% of the 5870 full strength, which is why I said it's better to get a 5850 (and overclock it if desire) than spending extra £80-£100 on 5870 instead that may or may not give performance boost.

I think it would be fair to say BFBC2 is more CPU intensive than Crysis with its destructable environment physics and stuff, so with [email protected] bottlenecking 5870 in Crysis, it would bottleneck 5870 in BFBC2 as well...logically speaking.

 

[davedudes]

I'll include the figures for i7 as well:
HD5870, 6GB Corsair 1,600Mhz DDR3
Crysis (DirectX 10, 64-Bit, High) at 1,680x1,050
Core i7 [email protected] (stock speed): 35-57fps
Core i7 980X [email protected]: 35-57fps
Core i7 980X [email protected]: 35-57fps

(source: Custom PC Issue 080 May 2010, p39)

So basically the 5870 is GPU bound at average 57fps. If you look back at the [email protected], it's average frame rate is only at 48fps, which is 9fps (15.8% of 57fps) lower than the GPU bound of average 57fps. What this means is that the [email protected] is only using around 84.2% of the 5870 full strength, which is why I said it's better to get a 5850 (and overclock it if desire) than spending extra £80-£100 on 5870 instead that may or may not give performance boost.

I think it would be fair to say BFBC2 is more CPU intensive than Crysis with its destructable environment physics and stuff, so with [email protected] bottlenecking 5870 in Crysis, it would bottleneck 5870 in BFBC2 as well...logically speaking.

Im getting conflicting advice here, one minute someone says i should be ok with a 5870 the next minute its not. but you have to be kidding that my 4Ghz cpu is a bottleneck for my 4890, i think you are just wrong, and btw I dont just play BC2, I have a wide range of games, im not just upgrading for that game.