Depending on your perspective, ATI’s latest and greatest high-end card could be the second coming of the Radeon 9700 for ATI, or it could be a bit of a disappointment.
In our benchmarks today the Radeon 5870 card clearly delivered the best performance of any single GPU we tested. While performance wasn’t double that of Radeon 4890, the 5870 did post some impressive gains in the most graphically intensive games we test with: STALKER Clear Sky, Crysis, and Far Cry 2; generally running around 1.5 times faster than ATI’s previous flagship offering in these titles. In comparison to NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 285, the 5870 generally ran 20-30% in the aforementioned games, although the 5870 really pulls away from the GTX 285 once Crysis is run under the “Very High” graphics setting. Here the Radeon 4890 is actually able to keep pace with NVIDIA, while the 5870 blows them both away.
In some of the other games the gains aren’t quite as impressive. In Call of Duty: World at War – based on an engine which has traditionally favored NVIDIA’s architecture in previous benchmarks – the GTX 285 trails the 5870 by just 11% at 2560x1600 resolution (the Radeon 4890 finishes behind the 5870 by 28% under this scenario). In another recent release, Capcom’s Resident Evil 5, the GTX 285 trails the Radeon 5870 by just 15% at 1600x1200 and 1920x1200. ATI says that they were “unable to receive builds of this game early enough to get a chance to test and address any open issues. We will work with the developer to test and adjust any compatibility or performance issues that we encounter.” That could explain part of the reason why the GTX 285 was able to hang so close to the 5870 at those lower resolutions.
Fans of NVIDIA will probably bring up our results with Wolfenstein too, but we’re not going to harp on these results as ATI’s OpenGL performance isn’t as big of an issue today as it was 5 years ago when people were actually playing OpenGL titles more frequently. Hop on a Wolfenstein server any night of the week and you’ll see just how dead the scene is today.
Overall ATI’s Radeon 5870 crushes today’s latest DX10 GPUs in performance, but you’re going to need to really crank up the settings and run newer, more demanding titles to see where the card really shines.
It’s the multi-GPU cards like the Radeon 4870 X2 and GeForce GTX 295 as well as the SLI/CrossFire setups that are going to be the biggest threat to the Radeon 5870 out-of-the-gate. While ATI’s Radeon 5870 is clearly the fastest GPU on the planet right now, NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 295 is still the world’s fastest graphics card overall. The 5870 manages to outrun the GeForce GTX 295 in H.A.W.X., but like Wolfenstein, this is one of those unpopular games that’s received a lukewarm reception from the public so far. ATI leverages DirectX 10.1 to outperform NVIDIA’s offerings, just as NVIDIA’s more efficient OpenGL driver allows them to outrun the ATI cards (with the obvious exception being the 5870) in Wolfenstein.
Because the 5870 isn’t delivering 2X performance speedups over the prior generation at this point, those of you who already own Radeon 4870 1GB or Radeon 4890 cards may want to just pick up a second card for CrossFire while they’re still cheap and plentiful. Radeon 4800 prices really can’t go any lower, and reportedly these cards will be phased out to make room for Juniper cards which will come in the next few months.
This story’s not anywhere near being over though. We’re pretty convinced that ATI’s driver team still has quite a bit of performance to wring from the hardware. Radeon X1800 owners remember the remarkable speedups follow-up Catalyst drivers were able to deliver, and ATI pulled off the same trick for Radeon 4800 series card owners last year. It’s definitely conceivable that in another 3-6 months the 5870 could end up delivering the 2X performance speedups you expect from a next-generation product.
ATI’s Radeon 5850 is another topic we can’t wait to write about, and don’t forget about the first DX11 games coming later this year like DiRT 2 and STALKER: Call of Pripyat, as well as ATI’s innovative Eyefinity technology.
Yes ATI, the game has changed, and you’re now the technology and performance leader. Clearly NVIDIA’s probably encouraged by the early performance results for 5870 though. Their GeForce GTX 295 is still the world’s fastest card, and while it’s now based on outdated technology, until the first DX11 titles show up, DirectX 11 is only an advantage that exists on paper.
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Mass Effect 3 PC Review
This latest release from EA/BioWare is the final entry in their trilogy of sci-fi action RPGs, putting you in a dire situation: rally the troops to save Earth at all costs. There was a lot of hype surrounding the final act of what has been a vast and highly-customizable story-telling experience, and the reception among many hardcore fans has been less than stellar. Even people that haven't played the game have probably heard about all the nerd rage going on over Mass Effect 3's ending...
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