ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB Review

Hey! Where's Overclocking, Thermals and Folding Performance?!

Sadly we couldn't do these things at this early stage of the card's release as we're using Beta drivers and none of the above can be done without. We tried just about every overclocking tool out there but couldn't persuade one to play ball with the early drivers. We should have the numbers for you by the time we review the first retail sample.

Performance Analysis

It's always a lot of fun getting in a new generation of graphics cards as you’re never sure what to expect. We might see something three times faster than the fastest thing we’ve ever seen, or something that resembles an overclocked version of a current generation GPU.

In this case, we got roughly what we expected; which is somewhere between these two scenarios. While the HD 5870 is essentially a replacement to the HD 4870 (as there's still an X2 card being hammered out on ATI's anvils), it’s fairer to compare the card’s price/performance ratio to an HD 4870 X2 or GeForce GTX 295 as these dual-GPU cards are roughly equal in graphical horsepower and are more cost comparable to the new Radeon card.

Starting off with Fallout 3 and the HD 5870 produced almost identical results to the Radeon HD 4870 X2 in most tests, a solid result considering we're on early drivers. As we worked through the resolutions the cards were neck and neck but the HD 5870 was slightly ahead of the HD 4870 X2 in most instances: to us this smells of a CPU limitation, where the single GPU has less driver overhead and gets a full x16 lane to itself to squeeze out a marginal lead. The HD 5870 had no trouble producing a smooth frame rate in Fallout 3 at 2,560 x 1,600 with 4x AA, producing a respectable minimum of 30fps, but at this resolution the dual-GPU cards gained some headway on the newcomer.


Like the Rancor in the Star Wars: Return of the Jedi chewing his way through Jabba's ork-like minions (Ed: That is probably the most obscure and geeky analogy we've ever used!), S.T.A.L.K.E.R:Clear Sky tears through graphics resources at a terrifying rate. In this ATI loving title, we found the HD 4870 X2 with its two GPUs came out on top in most tests, however the HD 5870 was not far behind. Running the game at 2,560 x 1,600 is one of the toughest tests we currently put a GPU through and at this resolution the HD 4870 X2 managed a smooth 27fps minimum while the HD 5870 racked up 24fps: a hair's breadth from what we consider a playable frame rate. Up to 1920x1200: basically anything below 30" monitor, you're laughing though.

Despite being almost as old as the Queen, Crysis remains the de-facto gauntlet for GPUs. The HD 5870 doesn’t have what it takes to run the game at 2,560 x 1,600 with the best playable resolution proving to be 1,920 x 1,200. Even then we had to turn off the AA to see a smooth minimum frame rate of 28fps as 4x AA was too much for the card. Crysis has a loving relationship with the GTX 295 though and at 1,920 x 1,200 the Nvidia card was a considerable 10fps faster than the HD 5870, however in terms of a single GPU product the HD 5870 is still clearly faster than the GeForce GTX 285 and Radeon HD 4890 on average, but just marginally so in minimums.

Being an RTS, Dawn of War II sees some CPU bottlenecking at lower resolutions but as we worked our way up to resolutions ntaive to the 24in display and gave it some AA it was clear which card was giving it more beans. At 1,920 x 1,200 the game wasn’t loving the dual GPU cards - a inherent consequence of driver limitation for multi-GPU - so the HD 5870 came out on top scoring a 34fps minimum, with the GeForce GTX 285 just behind it with 26fps. By the time we got to 2,560 x 1,600 with 4x AA the HD 5870 had opened a huge gap from the other cards on test. At these settings, an overclock on our Intel Core i7-965 would likely have pushed us over the 25 with the HD 5870 installed in the rig as the game was CPU limited.


We use Call of Duty: World at War for our benchmarks too as it’s such an incredibly popular game (and by extension, engine), but realistically it’s a piece of cheesecake to run. All of the cards on test were more than capable of nailing out smooth minimum frame rates at highest available in game settings and even up to 30in monitor resolutions with AA enabled the Radeon HD 5870 yields a perfectly playable experience at the top of the table. The game is clearly not a fan of dual GPU cards and only the HD 5870 and GTX 295 were capable of clocking up smooth minimums at 2,560 x 1,600, with the new Radeon actually only a couple of FPS faster at the top of the table.

Conclusion

Across the board the performance of ATI's new Radeon HD 5870 was relatively consistent. You can expect similar performance from the Radeon HD 5870 as you might see from a Radeon HD 4870 X2 with the advantage of avoiding devastating the frame rates in games that don't like multi-GPU setups such as Dawn of War II.

The difference between the two cards is DirectX 11 support, a fair whack less electricity and about £55 in raw cash. If you bought a HD 4870 X2 12 months ago, be happy, because you made an awesome investment that's still more or less as fast as the new card for another few months.

Between that and GeForce GTX 295 in a system, then the current lack of DirectX 11 games will make an upgrade far from being worthwhile. You're better off holding on to your dual-GPU card for the time being and setting some money aside for the pending release of the HD 5870 X2 or seeing how Nvidia's GT300 performs (whenever that arrives), by which point there will be more DirectX 11 games to enjoy.

If you have a Radeon HD 4870 512MB or even Radeon HD 4890 then an HD 5870 would be a more worthy successor for the role of frame rate churning in your gaming rig but only really if you have a 1,920 x 1,200 monitor. For now, 1,680 x 1,050 users should be fine to wait out upcoming products and future game demands.

Quite honestly, after 18 months between the last and this generation it's not really a large enough jump in performance to make us very impressed by the performance for a £300 product. It's looking like ATI have made a GPU to fill the big shoes left by its RV770-based cards, which is no mean feat, and given the quantum leap in performance the HD 4000 series was over the HD 3000, it hasn't achieved it again in raw FPS this time around. That's not to say it's at all slow though: it's still the fastest single GPU product and if you want the fastest, most future proof product available we'd recommend it, however it's not an "I must upgrade now" product. We'd wait that one out.

Or, if we weren't barred from entering it ourselves, we'd enter our brilliant competition to win a Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 Vapor-X card!

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Score Guide