The Radeon HD 5970: Completing AMD's Takeover of the High End GPU Market
by Ryan Smith on November 18, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
The Test
For the 5970 launch, AMD is launching the card with a special set of drivers based on the Catalyst 9.10 branch, version 8.663.1. These drivers have had a lot of work put in to their Crossfire abilities, both to enable Crossfire Eyefinity support on the 5970, and to improve overall Crossfire performance. The Crossfire performance improvement also cascades down to the 5800 series, where we’ve seen CF performance improve in Crysis and Dawn of War II, while we’ve seen Resident Evil 5 performance dip some. So we’ve rerun our 5850CF and 5870CF numbers with the new drivers an updated them accordingly; single card performance remains unaffected.
Also, for most of these games we’ve gone ahead and dropped all resolutions besides 2560. Crysis is the only game that even remotely struggles with the 5970 (and less so thanks to these drivers). Everything else gets 60fps or more at 2560.
Finally, we’ve gone ahead and benchmarked the 5970 at both stock at overclocked 5870 (850MHz/1200Mhz) speeds. Bear in mind that we did encounter VRM throttling at 5870 speeds however.
| CPU: | Intel Core i7-920 @ 3.33GHz |
| Motherboard: | Intel DX58SO (Intel X58) |
| Chipset Drivers: | Intel 9.1.1.1015 (Intel) |
| Hard Disk: | Intel X25-M SSD (80GB) |
| Memory: | Patriot Viper DDR3-1333 3 x 2GB (7-7-7-20) |
| Video Cards: |
ATI Radeon HD 5970 |
| Video Drivers: |
NVIDIA ForceWare 190.62 |
| OS: | Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit |
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
114 Comments
View All Comments
prophet001 - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - link
This looks like a sweet card. Certainly ATI is taking control of the market.One question though...
What happened to the Hydra by Lucid Logix? I haven't heard anything about it in a while. Theoretically, the Hydra should take 2 ATI cards and make them perform better than Crossfire can.
Any news?
tamalero - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - link
there as been reviews of HYDRA already, what planet are you on?GeorgeH - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - link
1) No need to be a douche.2) No Hydra 200 products have shipped, all current "reviews" have been done using Lucid's development hardware.
3) It appears that Hydra will not work well with dual GPU cards; it will see only one of the GPUs.
4) Early results show that Hydra offers roughly equal performance overall to Crossfire/SLI.
5) Link to one of the better articles I've read:
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=815">http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=815
driver01z - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - link
Wow - so we have a card now that plays the latest Crysis at 2560*1600, 4XAA with details at a smooth playable FPS. IMHO I believe we've entered a new GPU generation. Or new compared to the capabilities I'm used to.rcpratt - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - link
Is there some way to set up a dual-monitor setup (2 x 1920x1080) to run in horizontal span mode (3840 x 1080), like you do with your three monitors, without an Eyefinity card? I'm currently running with a 4870 and haven't been able to find a way to do this.The0ne - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - link
I haven't tried but you should be able to do this easily, using catalyst. There's an option there to flip your screens for horizontal/vertical views and duplicate/extend your screens. That should do it for you.I haven't use the flip feature but I use the extend all the time because I'm hooked up to my tv.
rcpratt - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - link
I've spent hours trying to find a way to do it with Catalyst, and I can't find one. Right now it's on extend, which just leaves the secondary monitor as the desktop, with no taskbar on the bottom, and leaves me unable to play games at 3840x1080.If anybody has an explanation or idea, I'd appreciate it.
Spoelie - Thursday, November 19, 2009 - link
To put it simple, no it's not supported. The only way you'll be able to use the second screen is with games that are explicitly coded to support dual screens (Supreme Commander?).Your only other option is to use a Matrox multimon device (forgot the name) or an EyeFinity card of course. No NVIDIA card will allow this either, it's not a driver issue.
Either way, 2 screens wouldn't be a nice experience anyway, with the big bezel right in the middle, I can't imagine any type of game where that would work (no FPS, RTS, RPG, racing game, ...)
rcpratt - Thursday, November 19, 2009 - link
That's what I was afraid of. Thanks. And yeah, I wasn't planning on playing with 2 monitors, but I was considering getting a third. Oh well, probably better that I can't blow the cash :)The0ne - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - link
On the same topic, does anyone know why my dual screen setup resets after PC restarts/shutdowns? In addition, I HAVE to select duplicate first, set it and then switch to extend. Selecting extend first doesn't enable it. Using current driver but this was there with previous versions as well.I've Googled and read many forums but haven't encountered many users having this particular issue. This is consistent in XP, Vista and Win7 as far as I can remember.
4870 with Dell 30" and Samsumg 73" 1080P TV. Temperatures around 56C for video card. If you have any tips I appreciate them. Thanks in advance.