Final thoughts, rating, HEXUS.right2reply
AMD's waited 15 months to introduce a new graphics-card architecture. It arrives in the form of the high-end Radeon HD 5870 and HD 5850 GPUs.Launched a month before the release of Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system, AMD is hoping to leverage the significant interest generated by the well-received OS and use it to catalyse sales of the next-generation cards.
Good enough?
The fundamental question we need to answer in the final analysis is whether AMD's efforts constitute reasonable GPU evolution given the 15-month hiatus between Radeon HD 58x0 and HD 48x0 GPUs.
The range-topping Radeon HD 5870 1,024MB is a single-GPU board that possesses impressive raw performance - 2.72TFLOPS - allied to a sensible design that's driven by DX11 compliance - which brings its own bag of goodies to boot, including mandated hardware tessellation and the useful DirectCompute shader for GPGPU duties.
Price vs. engineering cost
Priced at $399 (£299) for the HD 5870 and $299 (£220) for the slightly cut-down HD 5850, performance absolutely needs to be strong. AMD's engineers have been able to raise the cards' power over and above competing single-GPU models by cramming the new, smaller 40nm manufacturing process with over two-billion transistors - over double the Radeon 4K cards.
The upshot is a die-size of around 334mm², which whilst larger than the previous generation's, is, we feel, just about economically acceptable for GPUs retailing between $299 and $399. Naturally, given the current economic climate, a lower street price for the cards would have been preferable - say sub-£250 for the HD 5870 and sub-£200 for the HD 5850.
Pure performance
Focussing on the reviewed HD 5870, the GPU's heavy on shading but a little limited with respect to memory bandwidth. Our benchmarks shows the single-GPU board to trade blows with the currently-available but inelegant dual-GPU Radeon HD 4870 X2 (£250) and, on average, fall a little behind the also-dual-GPU, brutish GeForce GTX 295 (£330) from NVIDIA.
Did we expect a little more perf? Probably, but we'll see that in spades with the dual-GPU 'Hemlock' model later on this year, or with two or three cards placed in multi-GPU CrossFireX.
More than pixel-pusher
Looking at the card-wide package, AMD rolls in some neat features, including many-monitor Eyefinity support, much better-than-expected power-draw for both idle and load states, and, of course, full DX11 compliance. Perhaps the one missing feature is some form of on-GPU physics support, which is currently championed by NVIDIA.
Our overall feeling is that AMD's done a pretty fine job with the high-end Radeon 5-series cards. The architecture is evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and the lack of a 'wow factor' is squarely down to the availability of inelegant, hotter, noisier, and thirstier previous-generation dual-GPU cards from both NVIDIA and AMD.
Given a direct choice, however, we'd have the HD 5870 over the other two cards every day of the week: it's a fuller-featured single-GPU solution that's very strong in every area, and not just apt at producing high frame-rates.
Pragmatically, though, we're far more interested in how AMD chops up the R5K design for low-end (Redwood) and mid-range desktop (Cedar) and mobile cards, and we'll find out more in a couple of months' time.
An A+ response required?
NVIDIA will release DX11 GPUs at the back end of this year. AMD's shown its hand and we rate it as 'A', and there's little reason why it won't sell well in the lead time before NVIDIA's GT300 hits the shelves. The green team will need to bring an 'A+' game to the table if upstaging AMD is still a priority.
Bottom line: AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5870 and HD 5850 represent solid advances in GPU technology. NVIDIA will need to bring excellence to every facet if it's to a launch a better-thought-out series of high-end GPU.
HEXUS Rating
We consider any product score above '50%' as a safe buy. The higher the score, the higher the recommendation from HEXUS to buy. Simple, straightforward buying advice.
The rating is given in relation to the category the component competes in, therefore the ATI Radeon HD 5870 is evaluated with respect to our 'high-end components' criteria.
AMD ATI Radeon HD 5870 1,024MB
HEXUS Awards
AMD ATI Radeon HD 5870 1,024MB
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