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5870 or 6870?

Sukh

Sukh

Sukh

Soldato
Joined
29 Jan 2007
Posts
3,596
Location
Chelsea
I was looking at some benchmarks and it appears that for my resolution 1920 there is little difference between the above cards, and the 5870 performs better?

I am slightly confused by this, and further that the 6950 isn't massively faster than the 5870? Is the 6 generation a bit of a dog?
 
I don't know which one you should go for but I have two of the 5870's in crossfire.

They are an amazing card, plays everything I throw at them at 1920X1080.
 
Sukh said:
I was looking at some benchmarks and it appears that for my resolution 1920 there is little difference between the above cards, and the 5870 performs better?

I am slightly confused by this, and further that the 6950 isn't massively faster than the 5870? Is the 6 generation a bit of a dog?
Click to expand...

I went from a 5870 to a 6950. i wouldn't say there's huge difference,
but for me i found the 6950 to be a lot more smoother in some games!!
I see you live in chelsea ;) im just up the road in fulham!! but a chelsea fan:D
 
6 series is basically more efficient than the 5 series, with a couple of extra performance improvements.

The 5870 is faster than the 6870.
 
Damien. said:
I don't know which one you should go for but I have two of the 5870's in crossfire.

They are an amazing card, plays everything I throw at them at 1920X1080.
Click to expand...

Yeh I wanted to stick to a single card solution due to the cost and heat that it would put out.

Do you play BFBC2?

Nymins said:
6 series is basically more efficient than the 5 series, with a couple of extra performance improvements.

The 5870 is faster than the 6870.
Click to expand...

I might be being slow, but how can a more efficient card be slower clock for clock?
 
Your right in as much as the 6 series didn't really bring great leaps in performance (and neither did Nvidia's 500 line to be fair) it was really all about bring a new architecture out on the high end cards (6970 and 6950), improving the efficiency of older models by making them smaller and cheaper to make (the 5870 effectively become the 6870) and fixing the issues from the 5000 series (weaker tessellation performance and crossfire scaling).

If you believe the rumour mill in AMD defence the 6000 series was supposed to be manufactured on 32nm but TSMC scrapped the 32nm node and moved down to 28nm (I guess to stay competitive with Global Foundries) and both AMD and Nvidia were stuck on the same 40nm manufacturing process so performance improvements were always going to be limited.

Nymins said:
6 series is basically more efficient than the 5 series, with a couple of extra performance improvements.
Click to expand...

On what basis do arrive at the conclusion? The mid range cards (6870 and 6850) are more efficient or at least cheaper to make for AMD but the high end cards use more power but the performance gains aren't liner to the extra amount of power they use.
 
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So since the 5870 is cheaper and faster it is a no brainer?

Also the 6950 isn't that much faster than a 5870, not enough to warrant an extra £50 at least.

When are the 7 series coming out?
 
I didn't say anything about power usage? The 6 series are much more efficient at things like tessellation than the 5 series. They also scale much better in crossfire.
 
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When i played BFBC2 on my 5870 @ 1920x1200. at times i get a lot of slow downs when a lot was going on, but with the 6950 which i used the mod bios. i didn't get the slow downs, just feels a lot more smoother. frame rate seems the same there abouts, but like i said just smoother game play when things get heavy :)
 
Sukh said:
I might be being slow, but how can a more efficient card be slower clock for clock?
Click to expand...

The 5870 has 1600 spu 330mm2 die while the 6870 has 1120 spu 255mm2 die.

So with only 2/3 the stream processing units and only a 50mhz bump its achieving near 5870 levels of performance. (technically its in between the 5850/5870)
So they've made improvements and removed bottlenecks in the design and also been able to cut down uneeded resources, such as fewer TAU's, (80 in 5870, 56 in 6870), and overall power usage to reach that particualr performance level.

To be fair, a better comparison would be against the 1440sp 5850 which would perform similarily if its core were oced to 900mhz. Its still compares favourably for the 6870 design.
 
That is all good, but from a practical point, there are 10 frames in it on BFBC2, and the 5870 are cheaper so it seems like win win to me.
 
I'm not set, just don't get how the 6950 and 6870 are more expensive if they are slower?

Is the 6 series better at DX11? I know its better at tessalation, but what else?
 
If you run at a res above 1080p then the extra vram of the 6950 can be useful in some cases. If you don't, stick with the 5870, which is a very decent card for the money.

The 6870 if anything is slightly slower than the 5870 unless you're going crazy with tessalation so it's going to be a bad choice unless it's cheaper than the 5870. This isn't too crazy if you think about it - 5870 was released as a top-end card and the 6870 was released as a mid-high range card.

If you can get a 6950 that can be unlocked to 6970 it's a slightly more tempting prospect but even then the price difference makes the 5870 a better choice unless you're at a very high res.
 
Did they make a 5870 2gb?

I have a 4890 2gb Vapour X and was thinking I could just get an equivalent 5870?

And can you turn tessellation down? I know you can AA Af etc, but never seen tessellation.
 
I didn't realise they were cheaper, the 5870 cost more than 6870 when I checked a few weeks ago, maybe they have dropped prices to clear the stock.

If the 5870 is cheaper than the 6870 then I would go for that, its clearly the faster card and would be better price v performance than the 6950

Also as to your 1st question the 6970 replaced the 5870 as the next gen card, the 6870 replaced the 5770, thats why it seems there was no improvement from 5870 to 6870. They changed the numbering system.
 
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