The Smidgen

As promised, it’s here, the new Radeon HD 5870 from AMD.  In case you forgot this card is basically double everything you had in the RV790 chips (Radeon HD 4890) running in the same power envelope with lower idle power consumption.  Not bad eh?  It’s built using TSMC’s 40nm process allowing those 2.15b transistors to keep the power levels down (188W load and a very low 27W idle).  The 5870 with 1GB is also priced slightly lower than previously reported at $379, however, NewEgg is already sold right out of them.

So how does it perform you ask (naturally)?  Well AnandTech (as well as several other sites) has an extensive and lengthy review if you want all the details, including a lot of specifications and hardware diagrams, but I’ll summarize the juicy performance parts here.

For Crysis: Warhead AMD’s new card comes in just under the GTX 295 in pretty much every test.  AMD’s goal was to beat the 295 and they are really close but not quite there with Crysis.  Of course this new card is about $100 cheaper than the cheapest 295 out there and up to and over $300 cheaper than others, so take that as you will.  For Far Cry 2 the 5870 in fact does beat the 295 by just a little bit, though oddly it loses to it’s other multi-GPU competitor, the 4870×2, go figure.  As for the single GPU match up the 5870 beats the GTX 285 by 40%.  World of Warcraft?  Well it’s notoriously CPU dependent but nevertheless the 5870 beats pretty much everything out there except for an SLI configuration of GTX 285’s.  The story is pretty much the same across the board with the 5870 and the GTX 295 swapping wins here and there by small margins and the 5870 beating any other single GPU solution out there.

So what do we have then?  Well as a single GPU solution the 5870 is by far the fastest around and considering the 285’s price points are currently in the $300 range it makes the 5870 a far better purchase due to it’s slightly future proof DirectX 11 hardware.  In the single cards space however (meaning one card but possibly more than one GPU), the 5870 and the GTX 295 are close with the 295 being slightly faster.  Again you must consider a $100 price premium for a ~10% performace gain.  In the multi-card space two 5870’s in CrossFire mode is once again the clear winner.

So what games will take advantage of the 5000 series DirectX 11 prowess?  First is EA’s Battleforge; out just in time for the release of the 5000 series (a day early in fact) it is the first game to have DX11 support, though limited.  S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, went gold in Russia earlier in the week and should have an English version on the way.  While we don’t know the specifics of it’s DX11 content, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games are typically very tough of GPU’s so it should be an interesting test when released.  Dirt2 will be the first “full featured” DX11 title supporting tessellation, shadow filtering and other dx11 features and is due out December 11th for PC.  Aliens Vs Predator from Rebellion Games will be the most impressive DX11 game but it’s not due out till Q1 next year at the earliest.

So there you have it kiddies, AMD is first out of the gate with DX11 hardware and Nvidia is left to play catch-up for the first time since DirectX 9.0.  This could be a bad thing for Nvidia as game developers looking to incorporate DirectX 11 into their titles currently have only one choice of hardware, meaning the games will be tweaked to work with AMD’s DX11 implementations over Nvidia’s, something that happened in reverse with DX10.  The stage is set for the next battle royale, just waiting on Nvidia to show up to the party now.