Radeon 5870 is a monster

[Caydr]

5870 Review: http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon-hd ... view-test/
5870 x2 Review: http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon-hd ... st-review/

Short version:
Approximately 50-80% faster than the previous 4870 in most situations.
Two cards in crossfirex are frequently CPU-bound by the fastest consumer CPU in existence, overclocked.

I'm more tempted to think it's performance-bound by some other part of the system, perhaps the PCI-E bus. Otherwise, in a year's time or whatever when ATI/NV release the next-next-generation, there won't be much of anything to do but make the card less expensive.

Does anyone know what NV's next-generation card is shaping up like? By next-gen I mean the one they intend to compete with 5870 with, and should be released in the next few months presumably.

[Wartender]

i sure hope so because i tend to build a computer within the next couple of years and i don't want ATI to have the best stuff on the market since ATI and linux (and spring) don't get along so well , but yeah from what i've seen that thing is insane

[bobthedinosaur]

n

[CarRepairer]

If nvidia have a similarly priced card, and was only rated at half the performance, I'd still buy the nvidia.

[Gota]

If nvidia have a similarly priced card, and was only rated at half the performance, I'd still buy the nvidia.

That's just silly.
I have ATI right now and the only thing that works badly with it is Spring.

[Caydr]

What part of Spring works badly with ATI? I don't have a NV computer at the moment so I have nothing to compare my current quality/performance/features to.

IIRC I don't have anything to complain about, Spring-related at least. Everything runs smooth and I can use whatever features I want without an unexpected performance penalty.

With ATI I find I more often have to find a workaround for minor glitches, but I'm a geek so it's not an issue. For instance Jedi Knight works very nicely on NV cards but screws up on ATI. I googled it, found out I have to enable an advanced settings mode and change an option, then I'm good to go.

NV isn't without its problems either. STALKER for instance (and probably other games using the same engine) gets graphics glitches when it rains, and there's no workaround. Or... I forget, maybe you can fix it by running in DX8 mode? But then it looks like a game from 10 years ago.

I was very hesitant to buy my 4870 but it's true, the gap between the two companies' drivers has narrowed a lot. With DirectX 11 just around the corner, things like CUDA will be irrelevant because programs will be able to address the GPU directly for these kinds of tasks.

[Cabbage]

Right now i'd go ATI all the waym. Until recintly htety'tr eoulf nr e horr sotried with ATI cards, but ive had a 70800 GTCX and a 8800GT (which they gfooloushky renamed and foo.ed alot of consumers)

It seems to me liike Nvidai are better at getting an intil alrge GPU baed on the prevous genrationtion out, but ait m alithgouhg they have porr onprn GL suport (ATI)

umm rightno 5xx beath nvidia hands done on price/perforamnce. orry lostod of booxe and i cant be arsed to correftc all the mistrakes.

Basicly I have had a 7800GTX, and until it bklew up, anj 8800GT (9800GT / 250 GT?)

NNida are failing massively as far as i ca sdee, ive neber had an ATI card, but i fi bought one right noiwe, it wouyld probably be a discount 4890, at a massice dicount.

Sorry booze for poor spelling, butyouknow what i meanm, bozey boozey. with the lynfilreds nad a heapo 4850, / 4870/;90 you have a machimne thta will will run anything at a high resolution gor a xheap price.

sorry, piswED!

[Cabbage]

I dont play ,much, but nvidai drives worjed much better with recebnt verions (dyanamic water etc) than ATI, a\ssummining thesr bugs have been fixed, i'd go ati all the way (for price performance in all games overall) I use 9800gt (WHICH IS A REBRANDED 8800gt) AND NOE A 250gts? CANT RE,BE,BER, PLEASE DONT FLAME, SOMEONE WILL KNOW WHT I MEAN!

soRry, it's Been a while!

[BaNa]

I agree fully with cabbage

[Noruas]

I agree fully with cabbage

[Gota]

I agree fully with cabbage

[MidKnight]

I agree fully with cabbage

[Master-Athmos]

Yeah the 5870 is an extremely well done evolution which got a performance boost due to the smaller production line while working on next to every major disadvantage of the 4000 series being the AF filter (which still could be better but a first step has been made), voltage transformer quality & cooling and idle power consumption.

Concerning ATI drivers being buggy - sorry but you either had a very unlucky combination of certain parts that for whatever reason create an instability (although imo next to impossible in terms of mainboard/GPU combo nowadays), did something utterly wrong or changed from NVIDIA without reinstalling the OS. I've been using ATI GPUs since the X800 series and the drivers are just fine. The only thing where problems might occur is with Spring as you'll sometimes have features that aren't written ATI compatible and might cause crashes. So you've to know what works with ATI and what not. We lately had next to everything running on ATI but with the 0.8 release imo lots of things (I'm especially thinking about the water rendering) got incompatible again...

It'll now be interesting to see what NVIDIA will do as they've pretty much the worst situation to start from with this generation:
They have little experience with the 40nm process (and with again going for a big & strong chip won't make things better here), they had huge problems with pretty much all of their last generations as they pretty much all got delayed by quite some time (even though not really being that new or different technically) and they now have to do a total redesign integrating features ATI already had developed. Concerning the latter it's all about DirectX11 and NVIDIA's attitude towards DX10. In fact what we got as DX10 was a joke due to NVIDIA whining around - they didn't want to integrate quite some stuff and simply blocked. That's why Microsoft in the end agreed and took that stuff out of the DX10 specifications (actually what we got as DX11 pretty much is a slightly extended DX10 as it should have been). Unfortunately ATI already had invested quite some work on this sector most certainly being one of the reasons why their HD2900 series sucked so much. They already had things like a tesselator unit integrated in that series though and were able to carry that on until today...

It'll be interesting to see how NVIDIA will perform with their new chip. First leaking rumors / news already indicate that there'll be at least a bit of a cheating applied like the tesselator unit not being a dedicated unit of its own but being "simulated" by standard shaders. This probably would work but will be less performant than what ATI did...

[AF]

I type perfectly fine when drunk on here, and people rarely notice any difference from my usual misspellings. I can attribute this wonderful spelling ability to a button called backspace and its relative, the delete and arrow buttons. Firefox spellchecker (or any browser with google toolbar) helps.

Can we have a ban on people deliberalty misspelling their posts so that they can go all emo and demand attention because they cant handle their drink?

[BaNa]

no

[Pxtl]

I owned an ATI All In Wonder 9600. I will never own another ATI product.

[Peet]

I type perfectly fine when drunk on here, and people rarely notice any difference from my usual misspellings. I can attribute this wonderful spelling ability to a button called backspace and its relative, the delete and arrow buttons. Firefox spellchecker (or any browser with google toolbar) helps.

Can we have a ban on people deliberalty misspelling their posts so that they can go all emo and demand attention because they cant handle their drink?

My rule of thumb is If I can remember posting in the morning, the post contains correctly formed english.

[momfreeek]

My rule of thumb is If I can remember posting in the morning, the post contains correctly formed english.

You left out a colon.

[rattle]

I use 9800gt (WHICH IS A REBRANDED 8800gt)

for 100 eurobucks (1 GB, no-name)

[aegis]

My rule of thumb is If I can remember posting in the morning, the post contains correctly formed english.

You left out a colon.

you used dubious grammar while criticizing the grammar of another.