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***The Official ATI Radeon HD 5850 / 5870 Reviews and Discussion Thread***

If I had a 295 I'd sell it and get a 5870.

You'd get more for it now than waiting for these DX11 cards to become mainstream and have a single gpu card that produces less heat, uses much less power, has DX11 compatibility, proper HD audio and performance that's only a nats slower but with better minimum fps.
 
wolvers69 said:
If I had a 295 I'd sell it and get a 5870.

You'd get more for it now than waiting for these DX11 cards to become mainstream and have a single gpu card that produces less heat, uses much less power, has DX11 compatibility, proper HD audio and performance that's only a nats slower but with better minimum fps.
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This review gives you min fps in crysis warhead.

Dx10

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/23415-sapphire-radeon-hd-5870-1gb-gddr5-review-12.html

dx9

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/23415-sapphire-radeon-hd-5870-1gb-gddr5-review-11.html
 
TheRealDeal said:
You mean these where a 4890 is still as good as a gtx285 and the 5870 holds its own also aghainst the dual gpu cards.

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/ati_radeon_hd_5870_performance_preview/page11.asp
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I know about that already.

My point is when benching the fastest single gpu card known to man, use the highest settings in the game. The settings make a huge difference in Crysis, and on gamer settings is much less stressful than enthusiast. Hardwardcanucks are generally good with reviews, since they bench with a 4ghz i7.
 
tdream said:
I know about that already.

My point is when benching the fastest single gpu card known to man, use the highest settings in the game. The settings make a huge difference in Crysis, and on gamer settings is much less stressful than enthusiast. Hardwardcanucks are generally good with reviews, since they bench with a 4ghz i7.
Click to expand...

Yea i like Hardwardcanucks reviews also for the same reason as you they push the cards as far as they can go with the overclocked i7. I am not sure why they were on gamer settings but they had good performance graphs with minimum frames over a good number of resolutions and thats what the poster was looking for so i linked that review.
 
I got my XFX 5870's yesterday and I have to say I am well impressed with ATI's latest offering. I've upgraded from an old AM2 based system with a 320MB 8800GTS to an i7 build with 5870's in Crossfire and the difference is immense. The 5870's have much better airflow than any of ATI's other cards, temps at 40 on idle and 70 on load and with much less power consumption.

Thumbs up!:D
 
Wish they'd hurry up and roll out Vapour-X/etc versions with some aftermarket cooler/fan setups already. Looks like a great card but after my last experience with an ATI stock cooler I'll keep a hold of my money until something a tad quieter is available.
 
I guess i should post this in here cant see it elsewhere, wont post game details just the conclusion, dont want to spoil your fun.
Hardocps 5850 review
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2009/09/30/amds_ati_radeon_hd_5850_video_card_review


Value Cometh

We think the ATI Radeon HD 5850 is going to be a wildly popular video card among hardware and gaming enthusiasts. It seems there might be room for hardware enthusiasts to tweak performance out of this video card to extreme levels. The Radeon HD 5850 is priced to sell; at $259 it packs the most punch in its class with no close contenders. It beats higher priced video cards that used to dominate the playing field. The GeForce GTX 285 can be found at Newegg, cheapest price with rebates, $295.99. From there, the GTX 285 cards jump to $330 levels very quickly.

The GeForce GTX 285 was the king of the hill at its price point, offering even better performance than the Radeon HD 4890 in many games. The GeForce GTX 285, NVIDIA’s fastest single-GPU video card can climb down and make room for the ATI Radeon HD 5850. The ATI Radeon HD 5850 is less expensive and provides a better gameplay experience than the GeForce GTX 285. And the 5850 isn't even the best performing of AMD’s ATI Radeon HD 5800 series! The ATI Radeon HD 5850 is a mighty impressive value.

Smart Engineering

The Radeon HD 4850 was very popular with gamers flocking to it since it was just a "slower" Radeon HD 4870 at a more manageable price. It seems AMD has hit the sweet spot again by using the same ASIC as the Radeon HD 5870 and making a "lesser" version. The 5850 may have fewer streaming processor units, fewer texture units, and lower clock speeds, but it retains the 32 ROPs found in the Radeon HD 5870. As our testing has shown, both in Crysis: Warhead and Need for Speed: Shift especially, there is only but a small difference between 4X and 8X AA at high resolutions. Combine this with the fact that AMD has chosen to equip the Radeon HD 5850 with a 1GB framebuffer means it has the capacity to use those ROPs!

The results speak for themselves; the Radeon HD 5850 is a powerful video card at antialiasing performance. The Radeon HD 4800 series was well known for its superior 8X MSAA performance, and AMD is not backing off from that stance. AMD still offer the best antialiasing performance using MSAA methods.

Radeon HD 5850 CrossFireX

We experienced exceptional CrossFireX scaling, better even than what we experienced on the previous Radeon HD 4800 series. We did not think we would see much improvement in Arma II for example, but we saw better scaling with that game then we have ever seen with the HD 4800 series. We hope this trend continues, but we are still very worried about driver profile support with CrossFireX. We are worried about new game releases not receiving CrossFireX profile support the day games hit the street, delaying the potential performance one may experience out of a CrossFireX setup. This is the current nature of all multi-GPU configurations unfortunately. However, when CrossFireX works, boy does it work!

AMD has informed us that only one CrossFireX bridge connector is now required on the Radeon HD 5800 series. We originally setup our two HD 5850’s with just one bridge connector. We had no problems running our games at 1920x1200 with high levels of AA like 8X and CFAA modes. However, when we tried some games at 2560x1600 with 8X AA we experienced a few glitches. For example, Crysis: Warhead would experience some flashing textures at 2560x1600 with 8X AA at all "Enthusiast" settings. AMD told us that one bridge connector is all that is required; but if we were to ever experience flashing textures, try installing both bridge connectors. To our enjoyment, installing both bridge connectors resolved the flashing textures in Crysis at 2560x1600 at 8X AA. From that moment on we continued to test with both bridge connectors connected and had no problems whatsoever.

It seems that if you ever see any broken geometry or flashing polygons in your games with CrossFireX, and you only have one connector installed, try installing two, this can possibly fix your issue. So while one is required, for the most stable experience, and to ensure the least amount of trouble, we still recommend installing both connectors on the Radeon HD 5800 series. We will be looking into this more as we start to test Radeon HD 5870 CrossFireX which can push even more pixels.
Click to expand...
For $259 the ATI Radeon HD 5850 smacks the competition then laughs. AMD has engineered this series smartly, doing what worked for it with the Radeon HD 4800 series. The Radeon HD 5850 uses the same GPU as the Radeon HD 5870 with some streaming processor units and texture units disabled with lower clock speeds. In our gaming experience, the 5850 performed appropriately compared to the Radeon HD 5870. AMD was smart in keeping the 32 ROPs intact on the Radeon HD 5850 and equipping the video card with 1GB of GDDR5 memory. With this combination, dual-card 5850 CrossFireX performance is stellar. We were easily able to run at high resolutions with AA and high in-game settings.

If you are waiting for NVIDIA to jump out of the GPU closet with a 5800 killer and put the fear into you for making a 5800 series purchase for Halloween, we suggest paper dragons are not that scary. We feel as though it will be mid-to-late Q1’10 before we see anything pop out of NVIDIA’s sleeve besides its arm. We are seeing rumors of a Q4’09 soft launch of next-gen parts, but no hardware till next year and NVIDIA has given us no reason to believe otherwise.

The ATI Radeon HD 5850 currently provides the best performance and feature set at the sub-$275 price point. The entire 5800 series is forward looking as well, supporting DX11. We think the ATI Radeon HD 5850 is "THE" next-gen video card that gamers and hardware enthusiasts are going to flock to.

Now sit back and wait for CrossFireX support with Eyefinity Display Groups! If you have not seen Eyefinity in action, please check out our video review at the bottom of this page. Eyefinity is just one more reason to buy a 5800 series video card. Like you needed another excuse after seeing the performance anyway?
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A couple of tidbits...

The 5870x2 running cryengine 3... (fudzilla link)

Also, Brent Justice (video card editor over at hardOCP) also had a few comments about cryengine 3, which he played on a single 5870 at the AMD event recently:

I played with a single HD 5870 running CryEngine 3 in DX11 at the AMD event in California, and it was very smooth, everything was turned on at 1920 and it was running beautifully on one 5870. I actually went too far off the map they had to test on and got stuck inside an invisible wall, they had to Ctrl-Alt-Del out of the game and restart it, I guess I was too [H] for it :D
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Hard for pictures taken with a camera of a game on a display to come across over the Internet, but I can speak from experience playing around in CryEngine 3 in DX11, it was butter smooth at high settings, and looked fantastic. I think where Crytek has really improved this engine is in the performance, using DX11 the engine felt very fast on a single HD 5870. It is hard to gauge what a game will look like from a tech engine test, it is obviously up to game developers and designers to create and incorporate their own art assets into the game. Meaning world detail, lighting detail, art, textures, can look very different in a real game. This technology test is to show some of the effects of DX11 and performance of the engine, and they succeeded in putting the engine and DX11 in a positive light.
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yes but this engine is far better with the faults corrected (coding), in comparison to Cryengine 2 ..

but i wonder if they're improving the 2nd game at the same time.... because it wasn't just the engine that had problems was it...... those Aliens........... God sake, the last 1/3rd of the game was total and utter crap :D.

i would never buy a top end card to play Crysis.... my target is DOOM 4 :D

my guess is that the 5870 X2 will be overkill for DOOM 4........ but the damned card has to be future proof........ it has to last for 2 to 3 years.
 
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