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AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5870 Video Card Review

AMD’s ATI Radeon HD 5800 series debuts today and the new ATI Radeon HD 5870 is now available. We will give you all the gritty details of the HD 5800 Series, and show you just how well the new flagship ATI Radeon HD 5870 accelerates games. Can you say, “I like twice as much performance in the same power envelope.”

More To Come

If this evaluation has not satisfied your gaming curiosity, fear not, we have much more planned for the Radeon HD 5870. We will be conducting a follow-up, using nothing less than Windows 7 Ultimate RTM, and even newer AMD drivers for the Radeon HD 5870. This follow-up will also dive into some newer games and will include: Batman: Arkham Asylum and Resident Evil 5 which uses DX10, and we may even throw in an old title like GTA4 and see what happens. The follow-up will focus on dual and triple HD 5870 CrossFireX in comparison to single-GPU HD 5870, 4870 X2 and GTX 295. Hopefully our narrow look at the 5870 today has answered a few basic questions for you about its in-game performance.

We already have retail video cards on their way to us for evaluation. ASUS is sending us their new EAH5870/G/2DIS/1GD5/A, which is a Radeon HD 5870 at AMD specified frequencies. Uniquely, the ASUS EAH5870 will utilize voltage tweaking technology in software to overvolt the GPU allowing possibly very high overclocks. We will certainly be testing this out with great focus. The ASUS EAH5870 will be selling for $379.99.

Eyefinity and Multi-Display Support

Expect to see a video review of the 5870 and Eyefinity in action this week!

We have also talked about an upcoming 5800 series of video card that will support no less than 6 native displays as we saw with our initial Eyefinity coverage. We expect to see that "5870" video card in November and it will have six native mini-DisplayPort out connections. Interestingly enough, the entire new family of next-gen GPUs from AMD natively support six displays. So expect to see specialty 6-head cards for all sorts of applications other than gaming.

Later DX10, Hello DX11!

We need to talk about DirectX a bit more, because this is one of the shining new features supported on the Radeon HD 5870 and one feature AMD wants to push to sell you this video card. As we all know though as gamers, DX11 isn’t going to sell anything alone until we see a need for it and it shows real advantages in our gameplay. We thought that was going to be DX10, but as we all know those benefits were never realized( except in very few titles), and now it is time to throw DX10 out the window and skip right ahead to DX11.

The move to DX11, from what we hear, sounds like it is gaining much more support for adoption at a faster rate than DX10 did out the door. We have heard that some developers are simply ignoring DX10, and skipping ahead to DX11. What we think you are going to see is this leap in games from DX9 straight to DX11; leaving DX10 behind like it never existed. Indeed, there are probably some that feel it never really did exist at all anyway! DX10 has to be one of the biggest flops in DX history.

At launch, at least one game will be patched with DX11 support providing a few new graphical effects. Battleforge will be receiving a patch providing some new features such as HDAO and better Shadows. To be honest though, it didn’t impress us. We also know of at least one brand new game that will be out on the PC this year, DiRT 2, which will use DX11 in some interesting ways. The game will use DX11’s superior texture compression to provide higher quality textures. The game will also use DX11’s DirectCompute 11 to accelerate particle effects like debris on the GPU itself. Hardware tessellation will also be used to create geometry. All of these features will work on any DX11 video card, and AMD just happens to be the only one providing that right now.

We’ve been hearing a lot of good things about DX11; things that are making us think that maybe DX11 will not suffer the same fate DX10 did. Of course, DX10 was hyped up beyond belief leading us into thinking it was the next big revolution in gaming, and that never did deliver. We think Vista had a part in that as well. Now that Win7 is being treated as a friendlier upgrade path for many, hopefully DX11 will not suffer this same fate. It also all comes down to the game content. There are least two games that we know of that will support DX11 this year, and there are more planned for Q1 2010. It sounds like there is more support out of the gate for DX11 than DX10, and we certainly hope that increases, because honestly it really needs to if AMD wants to sell DX11 video cards on that merit.

AMD informed HardOCP that they have been seeding DX11 video cards to game developers and ISVs since June of 2009. Not only have the cards been out since then to developers, but they have sampled more cards in this generation than they did last generation to developers. What that means is that there are many more DX11 cards out in the wild now than there were DX10 cards, and game developers have been coding their game engines based on AMD’s DX11 video card as it is the only one available right now. Given what we know about NVIDIA’s next-gen GPU, AMD’s ATI Radeon HD 5800 series is THE model for DX11 games coming. At least for now since you can’t buy an NVIDIA DX11 card.

Eyefintity

Eyefinity 3x1 on an ATI Radeon HD 5870 here I come! It looks that 24" monitors will likely be the sweet spot for Eyefinity currently. For those of you hoping for 3x1 30" monitors via DVI, hang on a bit as we are still working the kinks out on that. As for gaming with 3 displays (2-DVI and 1-DP) in our Eyefinity display group, we are having no problems at all. I do however think that possibly for the first time in a long time, we are about to see a very valid reason for high end CrossFireX configurations. Crysis stretched across 3 screens looks effin sweet. I just wish I could turn the knobs all the way up to 11. Again, more coverage on Eyefinity here this week at HardOCP.

We think Eyefinity has a big chance at being the ultimate sales vehicle for AMD’s 5800 GPU series. Take older games and recently popular games, blow them up on "big screen" multi-display Eyefinity config and get your frag on like you never saw it before in huge resolutions. While we were sitting around hoping for game developers to bring us ultimate new content, AMD just figured out how to take our old games and give us an ultimate new experience.

The Bottom Line

To us, it sounds like AMD is serious about being the leader in new gaming technology, at least on the GPU side of things. AMD has been driving forth the point that the ATI Radeon HD 5870 is a gamers’ video card; it makes no excuses for that. AMD’s GPU CTO, Eric Demers told us that this GPU’s primary utility is to accelerate 3D PC games and bring an enjoyable gameplay experience to the hardware and enthusiast gaming communities. We came away from the AMD event in Alameda, CA with the clear impression that this video card was designed with the primary goal being to play games, simple as that.

However, none of the games we evaluated today, or will evaluate in the next couple of months support DX11, and so we just simply cannot test that aspect of this video card yet. However, as we have seen, it does have other benefits to gameplay. It is simply fast, in both DX9 and DX10. In addition to this the Radeon HD 5800 series innovates technology by creating Eyefinity, which is a great way to improve your gameplay experience with current DX9/10 games while we wait for DX11 games to get here. We will have more Eyefinity coverage this week!

Through all of this, Eyefinity, DX11, DirectCompute 11, OpenCL, the Radeon HD 5870 remains true to the focus of just being a desirable gaming video card. One of the most impressive "features" is the fact that it doubles performance, yet remains within the same power envelope as the previous generation. This is impressive. The fact that you can get all of this for around $379 makes it a really good value with a tremendous price/performance ratio compared to the previous generation.

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