The Radeon HD 5970: Completing AMD's Takeover of the High End GPU Market
by Ryan Smith on November 18, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
The Test
For the 5970 launch, AMD is launching the card with a special set of drivers based on the Catalyst 9.10 branch, version 8.663.1. These drivers have had a lot of work put in to their Crossfire abilities, both to enable Crossfire Eyefinity support on the 5970, and to improve overall Crossfire performance. The Crossfire performance improvement also cascades down to the 5800 series, where we’ve seen CF performance improve in Crysis and Dawn of War II, while we’ve seen Resident Evil 5 performance dip some. So we’ve rerun our 5850CF and 5870CF numbers with the new drivers an updated them accordingly; single card performance remains unaffected.
Also, for most of these games we’ve gone ahead and dropped all resolutions besides 2560. Crysis is the only game that even remotely struggles with the 5970 (and less so thanks to these drivers). Everything else gets 60fps or more at 2560.
Finally, we’ve gone ahead and benchmarked the 5970 at both stock at overclocked 5870 (850MHz/1200Mhz) speeds. Bear in mind that we did encounter VRM throttling at 5870 speeds however.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-920 @ 3.33GHz |
| Motherboard: | Intel DX58SO (Intel X58) |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.1.1.1015 (Intel) |
| Hard Disk: | Intel X25-M SSD (80GB) |
| Memory: | Patriot Viper DDR3-1333 3 x 2GB (7-7-7-20) |
| Video Cards: |
ATI Radeon HD 5970 |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 190.62 |
| OS: | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
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tcube - Monday, March 1, 2010 - link
Well my thought is that if amd would release this card on SOI/HK-MG in 32/28nm MCM config at 4 GHz it would leave nvidia wondering what it did to deserve it. And I wonder ... why the heck not? These cards would be business-grade-able and with a decent silicon they could ask for enormous prices. Plus they could probably stick the entire thing in dual config on one single card (possibly within the 300 W pcie v2 limit)... that would be a 40-50 Tflops card and with the new GDDR5(5ghz +) it should qualify as a damn monster. I would also expect a ~2-3k$ per such beast but I think its worth it. 50Tf/card, 6cards/server... 3Pflop/cabinet... hrm... well...it wouldn't be fair to compair it to general purpose supercomputers... buuut you could deffinatelly ray trace render avatar directly into HD4x 3d in realtime and probably make it look even better in the process...srikar115 - Sunday, December 6, 2009 - link
i agree with this reveiw ,here a complete summary i found is also intrestinghttp://pcgamersera.com/2009/12/ati-radeon-5970-rev...">http://pcgamersera.com/2009/12/ati-radeon-5970-rev...
srikar115 - Tuesday, April 20, 2010 - link
http://pcgamersera.com/ati-radeon-5970-review-suma...xpclient - Friday, November 27, 2009 - link
What no test to check video performance/DXVA? DirectX 11/WDDM 1.1 introduced DXVA HD (Accelerated HD/Blu-Ray playback).cmdrdredd - Sunday, November 22, 2009 - link
Clearly nobody buying this card is going to put Crysis on "Gamer Quality" They'll put it on the max it can go. Why is AT still the only tech site in the whole world who is using "Gamer quality" with a card that has enough power to run a small town?AnnonymousCoward - Sunday, November 22, 2009 - link
Why does the 5970 get <= 5850 CF performance, when it has 3200 Stream Processors vs 2880?araczynski - Saturday, November 21, 2009 - link
i look forward to buying this, in a few years.JonnyDough - Friday, November 20, 2009 - link
why they didn't just call it the 5880.Paladin1211 - Friday, November 20, 2009 - link
Ryan,I'm a professional L4D player, and I know the Source engine gives out very high frame rate on today cards. The test become silly because there is no different at all from 60 to 300+ fps. So, it all comes down to min fps.
I suggest that you record a demo in map 5 Dead Air, with 4 Survivors defend with their back onto the limit line of the position of the first crashed plane. The main player for the record will be vomitted on by boomer, another throws pipe bomb near him, another throws molotov near him also. Full force of zombies (only 30), 2 hunters, 1 smoker, 1 tank attacking. (When a player become a tank, the boss he's controlling become a bot, and still attacking the survivors).
This is the heaviest practical scene in L4D, and it just makes sense for the benchmark. You dont really need 8 players to arrange the scene, I think using cheats is much easier.
I know it will take time to re-benchmark all of those cards for the new scene, but I think it wont be too much. Even if you cant do this, please reply me.
Thank you :)
SunSamurai - Friday, November 20, 2009 - link
You're not professional FPS player if you think there is no difference between 60 and 300fps.