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Discussion On The ATI Radeon 5*** Series Before They Have Been Released Thread

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rafster said:
This is a big marketing coup for AMD
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Obviously it's a bit early to get over-excited, but this does look like a promising swing of vid card power back towards ATI/AMD for a while. Which is great news for two reasons. First, it's always great when any manfacturer comes up with a really impressive product. Second AMD are hurting pretty badly (sadly!) in the CPU field at the moment. The revenue and kudos generated by this ought to help their 3rd quarter results (perhaps explaining the launch squeezed into September) and boost morale.

That's good for all of us.

Andrew McP
 
Rroff said:
I'm just perplexed by people equating the multi display results to the cards performance potential in more normal gaming situations.
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Multi-monitor gaming may not be of direct relevance to most people (yet, you just haven't tried it yet :-) but at the end of the day it's not about how many monitors are being used, it's about how many pixels are being shifted. And ATI are shifting a heck of a lot of pixels with these cards! Whether you prefer a 30" widescreen monitor running at 2560 x 1600 or widescreen 3x1920x1200, you need a card capable of shovelling pixels through the display ports faster than a fast thing on Veyron roller skates.

Don't get distracted by the monitor count. That's important to me, but it's all about the amazing pixel juggling.

Andrew McP
 
FOV is increased from 2.1 to 12.4 megapixels.

Repost of an image from earlier in the thread to demonstrate how much more you see...

eyefinity.gif
 
magnuswinwick said:
FOV is increased from 2.1 to 12.4 megapixels.
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You can't quote FOV in mpx... also that comparison is done incorrectly - although granted can see from that image the fov has been pulled up a bit from normal... but thats still not the point - your not rendering an excessive amount of extra data - the big hit is the fillrates which can't be directly correlated to normal gaming performance - tho it does help.

Seems like the ATI fans are rather touchy....
 
To be fair, it seems like you are oblivious to what we have in front of us. Come benchmark day, I will be intrigued to see your opinion then. Are you going to still talk down some of these big things? (performance, onboarding developers etc)

You can call people ATi fans but you are definately a Nvidia fan who never has much good to say about ATi, which is ironic as your previous gripes about developer support etc has been completely shot down by the ATi PR in the past few days.
 
Oblivious in what way? I've never denied the power of the GPU - I'm just not that impressed by one aspect which at the moment seems to be what everyone hung up on...

As I said before - ATI have done well support wise for the launch work up - but it remains to be seen how long it will remain this way so it doesn't really shoot down anything I've said before...

EDIT: I've been quite positive about many aspects of the 5870, people are just so fixed on their preconceptions they can only see that one negative thing I say... likewise they seem to completely overlook the fact that 2 in 3 things I've said about nvidia recently have been extremely scathing and only see the few positive things I say about them... tbh its getting quite irritating tho I did have to laugh when kylew couldn't even conceive my recent post on nvidia was all negative because he was so fixated by the belief I'm an nvidia fan.
 
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Problem with 4+ GPUs tho - things tend to get quite laggy - even when your drawing really high framerates it still only feels like half the framerate or less... great for presentations and stuff but not so great for actually playing - get this sometimes with SLI even with 2 GPUs.
 
Rroff said:
Oblivious in what way? I've never denied the power of the GPU - I'm just not that impressed by one aspect which at the moment seems to be what everyone hung up on...

As I said before - ATI have done well support wise for the launch work up - but it remains to be seen how long it will remain this way so it doesn't really shoot down anything I've said before...
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Well this looks way better than before, Crytek demonstrating on AMD hardware, DIRT, Stalker etc etc....Why wouldn't it remain? It's all about DX11 in these cases...all NV have is the Batman game RE: press reports and Mirror's Edge which they may as well give it away with cereal packets it's so cheap...

I and many others are not referring to Eyefinity, but what Eyefinity has clearly show us is the GPU power here.

You clearly prefer Nvidia, wether it's because you coded with their libraries or whatever, I still don't get why you can't onboard the above.

If this card is a 295 destroyer then what do NV have in 2 weeks time? Over night the 285/295 becomes redundant, and I am sure the rest of ATi's line up (eg 4890 etc) will also decrease.

This is not what we want in the long term, NV "just" need to go and produce a price competitive top end card which supports DX11, stop being so stubborn with PhysX/3d whatever/CUDA and compete on price/performance.

If NV come out on 5870 release day with "yeah our 260s out perform in Batman, the game of the year" (game of the year of course!) then that will be an embarassment.

I'll reiterate again in case you want to label me an ATi fan, look at my current GPUs below and I have owned more NV than ATi since I started building my own PCs.
 
Rroff said:
Problem with 4+ GPUs tho - things tend to get quite laggy - even when your drawing really high framerates it still only feels like half the framerate or less... great for presentations and stuff but not so great for actually playing - get this sometimes with SLI even with 2 GPUs.
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I have had 4 GPUS already & have not noticed.
 
rafster said:
I and many others are not referring to Eyefinity, but what Eyefinity has clearly show us is the GPU power here.

You clearly prefer Nvidia, wether it's because you coded with their libraries or whatever, I still don't get why you can't onboard the above.

If this card is a 295 destroyer then what do NV have in 2 weeks time? Over night the 285/295 becomes redundant, and I am sure the rest of ATi's line up (eg 4890 etc) will also decrease.

This is not what we want in the long term, NV "just" need to go and produce a price competitive top end card which supports DX11, stop being so stubborn with PhysX/3d whatever/CUDA and compete on price/performance.
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This is the problem... its a fallacy to equate the eyefinity performance to the overall capabilities of the GPU... most people seem to be equating it to 6+ fold increase in your normal gaming performance when it can't be directly compared.

To grossly over simplify... you have 2 components here... first you build the scene, then you render it...

if you had 2 cards both capable of building the scene at identical performance - but one had a quarter the fillrate of the other then on multi displays it would limp along while the other was flying... but go back to your more normal resolutions and both cards are equal...

So just theoretically - and again overly simplified - you had a scene that the 285GTX was building twice as fast as the 5870 but your rendering at a resolution where the 285GTX runs out of fillrate, but the 5870 doesn't and you end up with identical framerates on both... which is the faster card?

This is why I find people getting so worked up over the eyeinfinty performance somewhat cringe worthy.



nVidias problem isn't so much performance tho... they could release a card "tomorrow" that destroyed the 5870 purely on performance... but they've concentrated too much on 200 series rehashes with the GT300 more of a future thing... and ended up done up like a kipper coz who in their right mind is going to buy an expensive DX10 "maybe" DX10.1 card now?
 
Rroff said:
This is the problem... its a fallacy to equate the eyefinity performance to the overall capabilities of the GPU... most people seem to be equating it to 6+ fold increase in your normal gaming performance when it can't be directly compared.

To grossly over simplify... you have 2 components here... first you build the scene, then you render it...

if you had 2 cards both capable of building the scene at identical performance - but one had a quarter the fillrate of the other then on multi displays it would limp along while the other was flying... but go back to your more normal resolutions and both cards are equal...

So just theoretically - and again overly simplified - you had a scene that the 285GTX was building twice as fast as the 5870 but your rendering at a resolution where the 285GTX runs out of fillrate, but the 5870 doesn't and you end up with identical framerates on both... which is the faster card?

This is why I find people getting so worked up over the eyeinfinty performance somewhat cringe worthy.
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I agree with that, the nearest thing we have seen to the potential power of the 5870 is the rumoured crysis benchmarks.
 
Final8y said:
I have had 4 GPUS already & have not noticed.
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Have you tried comparing to one GPU with comparable performance? you tend to get used to it or not even notice it until you've tried a system that doesn't have the lag...

that said ATI especially with their 8/16 GPU workstations setups for simulations, etc. and nVidia to a lesser extent have been working on their multiGPU algorithms to reduce how much it gets into the system - which is why you won't really see pure AFR mode used to this extent.
 
D13 said:
I agree with that, the nearest thing we have seen to the potential power of the 5870 is the rumoured crysis benchmarks.
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tbh the crysis benchmark is a mix of 2 results not done with a common control - the 295 and 4890cf were from an earlier test done on an i7 and different OS and the newer one on an AMD CPU... can't even be sure how close the settings match.

TBH tho comparing the performance of the 5870 in conventional games won't really show its real power your prolly looking at around 1.6x the performance of conventional cards on average... but the card is capable of around 3x the performance of a 285GTX when you start throwing more complex shaders, etc. at it.
 
It looks like ATI have done really well this time and have got a good number of developers working on their GPUs and with DX11, hopfully we will see the PC graphically hammer the consoles over the next year, giving PC gaming a shot up the arm.
 
Rroff said:
Have you tried comparing to one GPU with comparable performance? you tend to get used to it or not even notice it until you've tried a system that doesn't have the lag...

that said ATI especially with their 8/16 GPU workstations setups for simulations, etc. and nVidia to a lesser extent have been working on their multiGPU algorithms to reduce how much it gets into the system - which is why you won't really see pure AFR mode used to this extent.
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Going from 4GPU to 1GPU was just a mouse click away & im running on a single GPU ATM as the other 3 have been sold awaiting the 2x 5xxxX2.
 
Final8y said:
Going from 4GPU to 1GPU was just a mouse click away & im running on a single GPU ATM as the other 3 have been sold awaiting the 2x 5xxxX2.
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Yeah but have you tried with 1 GPU with similiar performance to your 3-4 card setup? even going from 8800GT SLI to an OC'd 260GTX giving very slightly lower fps than the GT SLI setup it was noticeable - tho not massive - from my experience with quad SLI its even more noticeable when you've used both... not had much experience with crossfireX tho.
 
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