ATI Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Review

Results Analysis

We’ll start with Dirt 2 as this games is something of a posterchild for DX 11 and was the most controversial during testing. The HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 card looks like it’s done very well in this game, managing higher frame rates than even the dual-GPU Radeon HD 5970. However, this performance is due to the Catalyst 10.3a Preview Driver we had to use with the Eyefinity 6 card which also contains some huge Dirt 2 optimisations – we tried the HD 5870 with the Catalyst 10.3a driver and found that it achieved the same high frame rates as the Eyefinity 6 card.

Most of the other game tests showed no difference between the Eyefinity 6 card and the standard HD 5870 on our three 1,920 x 1,080 NEC MultiSync EA231Wmi screens. STALKER: Call of Pripyat showed no improvement with the extra 1GB of memory the Eyefinity 6 card has, and neither did Battlefield: Bad Company 2. It’s also worth noting that the dual-GPU Radeon HD 5970 was significantly faster than either game in many games, although it refused to work in Crysis at the Eyefinity resolution of 5,760 x 1,080.

Even in games where we did see some advantage from the 2GB of memory of the Eyefinity 6 card, it was only when we had applied 4x AA. In Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising the Eyefinity 6 card performed identically to a HD 5870, with a minimum of 24fps and an average of 43fps. When we turned AA on, the performance of the standard HD 5870 dropped to a minimum of 13fps while the Eyefinity 6 card could generate a minimum of 15fps. In Crysis the Eyefinity 6 card avoided the 0fps minimums of the regular HD 5870 which occurred whether we tested with High or Very High detail settings.

These results are interesting in light of our recent Nvidia GeForce GTX 480 testing, where the Nvidia cards were very competent when dealing with AA in Chaos Rising at every resolution and in Crysis at high resolutions – in both cases the games are clearly enjoying the 1.5GB of memory of the GTX 480 rather than the 1GB of the HD 5870.


The extra memory of the Eyefinity 6 card causes its GPU to be 3°C hotter than the standard card, and to consume 9-10W more power. If you’re concerned about 10W of power draw then you’ll also be shocked when you remember that we were also having to power three screens too. The slightly higher temperature puts the Eyefinity 6 card in line with the HD 5970, but none of the cards gets overly hot. However, the cooler of the Eyefinity 6 card produced a louder, whinier noise than that of the standard HD 5870.

Conclusion

Using three 1,920 x 1,080 screens represents the largest practical amount of screen space with which to show the benefits of the 2GB of memory of the Eyefinity 6 card, as 21.5in and 23.5in screens use this resolution and the 16:9 aspect ratio is dominant with modern monitors likely to have a DisplayPort input. Using three screens of a higher native resolution will turn out to be phenomenally expensive, and as we’ve seen, six-screen gaming is undesirable.

ATI’s Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 card fails to make much performance impact at 5,760 x 1,080, with only a couple of our test games reacting to the card's extra memory, and even then only we applied AA. Worse, still both of those games suffered from sub-20fps jittery frame rates once we had applied the AA, making the extra performance academic rather than useful. With a price of £430, and given that any HD 5870 can run three screens, unless you're obsessed with six-screen Eyefinity - and we think it's not a good idea - the Eyefinity 6 card is a pointless purchase.

However, don’t confuse our lack of enthusiasm for the Eyefinty 6 card with the whole of Eyefinity. While three-screen Eyefinity gaming certainly has a few niggles, and the game support isn't comprehensive, we did have a sense of loss when we went back to single-screen gaming. It was like being back in days when 16:10 monitors and widescreen gaming was taking off – going back to a square screen just felt restrictive, and so it was with Eyefinity. So, while we’ll give the Eyefinity 6 card a miss, we hope that ATi and game developers pursue and refine Eyefinity as a technology.

• Performance
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• -
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• 8/10

• Features
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• -
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• 8/10

• Value
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• -
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• 4/10

• Overall
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• -
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• 6/10

Score Guide