AMD’s Radeon HD 5830: A Filler Card at the Wrong Price

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• 7Enigma - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link

  Ryan,
  
  I really don't understand the results here. You have this new card with:
  
  -more stream processors
  -more texture units
  -the same number of ROPS
  -50 MHz slower core clock (that's 5% btw)
  -virtually the same memory clock
  -same bus width
  -same frame buffer size
  
  How the heck can it be 20% slower than the 4890? Can this really be due to driver issues. On paper I just can't see this being more than 5% slower in a game that is solely bottlenecked by the core clock, and in most cases would expect it to be faster than the 4890.
  
  Is there something crazy like the 2.15B transistor count is causing the data to travel longer distances (or leakage issues) than the 4890 with its ~1B count? That doesn't jive with my brain but I'm not able to come up with any other reason why the 5830 should be slower....

• Assimilator87 - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link

  Yeah, the most baffling fact from this review isn't how horribly priced the 5830 is, it's how a card with 40%, 40...percent, more shaders and texturing units and a newer architecture can be slower. It's absolutely mind boggling. I'd really love it if Ryan or Anand would do a reevaluation of the Evergreen architecture to gain some insight as to why it's so much less efficient than the R700 family.

• Paladin1211 - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link

  I think Ryan has stated it very clearly:
  
  "Moving away from the 5450 for a moment, besides the Radeon HD 5770 this is the only other card in the 5000-series that is directly similar to a 4000-series card. In fact it’s the most similar, being virtually identical to the 4550 in terms of functional units and memory speeds. With this card we can finally pin down something we couldn’t quite do with the 5770: clock-for-clock, the 5000-series is slower than the 4000-series.
  
  This is especially evident on the 5450, where the 5450 has a 50MHz core speed advantage over the 4550, and yet with everything else being held equal it is still losing to the 4550 by upwards of 10%. This seems to the worst in shader-heavy games, which leads us to believe that actual cause is that the move from DX10.1 shader hardware on the 4000-series to DX11 shader hardware on the 5000 series. Or in other words, the shaders in particular seem to be what’s slower."
  
  http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3734...">http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3734...

• Ryan Smith - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link

  And at this point, that's still the best answer I can give you. I don't know exactly why this card is slower; it does well in synthetic benchmarks. A general degree of shader inefficiency still seems to be the most likely culprit.

• silverblue - Friday, February 26, 2010 - link

  Perhaps AMD can shed some light on the subject, though I expect they'll more than likely wait for you to post a follow-up article before admitting anything. I refuse to believe it's bad drivers that aren't taking proper advantage of the hardware, a la the 8500.

• pierrebai - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link

  Ask for new benchmark using the lastest AMD drivers. Each release improves the perfs for the new cards. For example, for 10.2:
  
  DiRT 2 – Overall performance improves up to 8% on ATI Radeon™ HD 5970, ATI
  Radeon™ HD 5800 series, and ATI Radeon™ HD 5700 series products
  
  Battleforge – CrossFire ATI Radeon™ HD 5870 performance improves up to 6%
  
  Unigine Heaven – DirectX 9 CrossFire performance has improved significantly on
  ATI Radeon™ HD 5700 and ATI Radeon™ HD 5800 series products
  
  The Chronicles of Riddick – Assault on Dark Athena – Overall performance on
  ATI Radeon™ HD 5970 improves up to 4%
  
  ...

• LordanSS - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link

  Latest drivers are buggy. No can do games with stupid mouse cursor issues and videos causing crashes.
  
  Until they definitely fix these issues, 9.12 hotfix it is.

• silverblue - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link

  I think someone once said that they believed the 5xxx series to be slower, clock-for-clock, than the 4xxx series. Certainly seems to be ringing true in this case.

• coldpower27 - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link

  Agreed in theory the 5870 is double the 4890, you have the same core clock, 2x the SIMD's, 2x ROP's. 2x the Texture Units, but only a 23% increase in Memory Bandwidth. And on average your looking at 40-50% faster.
  
  The SIMD's on the 5xxx just aren't as powerful as the one's on the 4xxx Series.
  
  I hope that is no the case on the Fermi core.
  
  

• Xtrafresh - Thursday, February 25, 2010 - link

  Good point. I can see all the extra feature hardware get in the way of straight-up performance as the only explanation i can come up with now.