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AMD Radeon HD 5970 Dual-GPU Card Sweeps Benchmarks
MojoKid writes "AMD launched yet another high-end graphics card based on their Radeon HD 5800 series technology, and this time it's a dual-GPU variant. Considering the fact that AMD's Radeon HD 5870 is currently the fastest single-GPU powered graphics card currently on the market, the new dual-GPU powered Radeon HD 5970 should offer performance that completely outclasses any other single graphics card on the market right now. The card has 3200 stream processors under the hood, though its graphics engines are built on 40nm manufacturing technology, so power consumption isn't actually too insane. The card does exceptionally well in the usual benchmarks, as expected." HotHardware has begun providing single-page views — a user-friendly decision. PCPer.com also has coverage. And pcpro.co.uk wonders whether, at 13" (33 cm) in length, the new card will even fit in most PC cases.
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3679
In any case I can imagine the computer roaring under my table...and myself in a corner crying like a baby out of fear.
Obviously, a card like this is pretty dubiously practical for virtually any application, and exists entirely to soak up the least cost sensitive gaming enthusiasts and the latest round of benchmark bragging rights(and, possibly, as the beta test for a much more expensive workstation equivalent, once the drivers are in order).
For benchmark bragging rights, it doesn't even have to fit into a case. It'll just be tested benchtop, get the numbers it needs, and be a success. For price-insensitive gaming enthusiasts, it barely matters if it fits in an existing case. The sort of people who buy the top-of-the-line card(rather than the 90% of the performance, 50% of the price model) can (and will) just buy a new case.
first porst!
Actually you were second. Betting you wish you had that graphics card now so that the page would have rendered quicker allowing you to post faster :)
Summation 2
In other news Nvidia just released a sub 100$ card.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/09/11/17/2035200/NVIDIA-Ships-Decent-DX10-Graphics-Card-For-Under-100
The technology idols can fall over-night. Let's hope they can come back, it's bad for consumers to have only 1 option.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
While proprietary support for ATI cards in linux can indeed suck, they do have far better support from the Free drivers. Of course, if you are buying this card to use with the Free drivers, you probably need to rethink your purchase.
That said, I'm a linux user who doesn't do heavy gaming so I don't get big expensive graphics cards, and ATI will be my first choice for the forseeable future.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
He couldn't fit it in his case, you insensitive clod!
This is a comment on AMD's business, marketing, and PR, rather than their technical team. AMD has unquestionably won the latest round against NVidia, who will have to wait until next year (and miss the holidays) before they have a shot at retaking the top performer and price-performance crowns back.
But let's be real. The 5850 and 5870 have already "launched" too. But unfortunately AMD's idea of a "launch" is "you can buy it 4-16 weeks from now."
I see a lot of companies "making their deadlines" this way. i.e. by not actually making them. Surprised at how often the press gives them a pass on it.
Tired of Political Trolls? Opt Out!
Honestly, the card can be the hottest thing in existence but if the system reboots due to a driver (per the system log) and there are numerous complaints, maybe you should spend more time getting the drivers right.
I have a pair of ATI 4870's. When I put it into Crossfire mode, the games work great. When I take them back out of crossfire, the system can reboot 4 or 5 times during Windows startup before the system finally starts. Occasionally the system will reboot during regular Windows startup. Log errors indicate a problem with an ati driver. (I have three monitors. Going into crossfire loses access to the other card with two monitors so I have to come out of crossfire to recover.)
Comments in the forums is to upgrade the drivers. But jeeze, I have to use a registry cleaner and driver cleaner to get every little bit of older ati driver from the system or I have no end of driver problems when I upgrade. Once it's cleaned and an upgrade installed, it brings it back to the occasional reboot and reboot when coming back from Crossfire.
If you can't get your drivers right, people won't buy your cards more than once and the folks that do and experience problems will turn folks away from your business. I know I recount this story on the forums I frequent.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
That's what she said...
sigs... don't talk to me about sigs....
a free mini-DisplayPort to DisplayPort adapter that this card has should also come with all apple systems but wait they don't even offer a cable like that at all.
also why did they not test 2 of this card in crossfire?
Why do you want to put in CF?
That's 4 GPU's, isn't that a bit of a overkill with GPU's of this type?
NOTHING out there will come even close to straining this dual card, so CF would be rather pointless imo.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
Judging by this year's AMD/ATI driver support, support for this card will probably be considered "legacy" and cease to be maintaned in a couple of years.
That means no more xorg/kernel updates for you!
If the drivers were *truly* open sourced this would never be an issue.
Of course you can buy a "supported" card every 2 years and upgrade.
If you have a laptop with a "legacy" card, well your pretty much f*****!
Thanks but no thanks
The bank wouldn't let them have a HELOC, so they could only afford one. So blame the "credit crunch".
When I put it into Crossfire mode, the games work great. When I take them back out of crossfire, the system can reboot 4 or 5 times during Windows startup before the system finally starts.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I will agree that open-source drivers for ATI cards are fantastic (and binary drivers are truly terrible). I'm using the new (using release candidates of kernel 2.6.32) r600 hardware acceleration support, and it's already working very well for me (mostly for Google Earth and Kwin desktop effects, both of which work flawlessly and very smoothly).
However, I would caution that support for the chip mentioned in this article (Radeon Evergreen) is marked as "TODO". Presumably, it should progress relatively fast, because AMD is basically being helpful.
Nvidia deserves some credit for updating their binary driver regularly, and making helpful changes very fast when alphas of KDE 4 started showing up performance issues in some previously rarely-used features, but AMD has done rather better by actually providing documentation to freedesktop people (even if ATI never maintained their own binary driver very well at all).
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
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For me the news reads: ATI anounces a new, faster graphics card which is as unavailable as the previous one.
I have friends that do the same thing I do and most of them have had no where near the same problems with ATI cards. But for me, no more ATI Radeon cards.
I know I don't know you, so forgive me for being a douche, but...maybe you should think about changing careers?
Living With a Nerd
And it costs as much as a Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3 combined! What a bargain. No wonder PC gaming is losing so much headway to consoles.
If you run operating systems other than Windows, ATI should be the only choice you make. They're actually committing to open-source drivers, and delivering. It'll probably be in the next round of Linux distros that open-source Radeon drivers will be fully working. Right now the Fedora Core 12 release has open-source Radeon 2xxx and later support. Reports are that it's working quite well.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
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i have been going on ATI since 6 years, and never looked back. if you have been fucked up in the ass, change your brand/provider. actually you will always get screwed if you choose the wrong brand/provider.
always go with sapphire or asus for ATI cards. sapphire is the best, Asus is also as reliable.
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and im hacking crysis to max graphics settings, overclocking the card, and still getting 15 fps from it in 1920x1200, in playable fashion. i even played age of conan with this thing in full setting, despite the fact that it is a game that doesnt even work well with the 8800 cards it was designed for.
excuse me, but if you people are still having problems with ati cards, its your fucking fault.
you need to buy quality pieces for all the parts in your computer. mobo, cpu, ram, even the dvd reader has to be reliable brands, so that they wont cause any untrackable incompatibilities with some chip in some other part and cause absurd results in any application.
if you take care while buying parts, instead of going postal with some 'brand' offering you a 'great deal' and then trying to insert a top notch graphics card on top of shitty components, you will never have problems with good cards.
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the most annoying thing about new graphics cards generally happens to be the fan sound to cool them off.
it doesnt matter how many pixels/sec it gives to me, or how good it renders, if it creates a huge noise while im playing my game.
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Nelson? Is that you?
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Don't even have to dig into the comments, and I've already landed my daily dingbat.
What does "most" have to do with it? A 500HP V12 won't fit in most passenger cars, either. But wait! You can upgrade your chassis for $60. Perhaps your power train is the bigger concern?
Was the heading on this review "Plebeian concerns on planet drool-worthy?" That must keep the transporter owls flying 24/7.
Or was the implied lament "13 inches and nowhere to put it?" For all I care, our beamish hero can rent himself a bandersnatch.
Part of the meme in these enthusiast reviews is to say the stupidest thing you can think up, to imply that the circulatory system is otherwise engaged. I'm sure Spock's subspace mailbox was crammed to the dilithosphere with "why wait se7en years when you can pon f4rr tomorrow?"
If his human side gained control, he would have become the worst drug addict in space. And stupid, too.
Wish I could mod you Informative.
ATI is also supporting open source game physics (and other GPU computing) using OpenCL, while Nvidia is locking out customers who want to use Nvidia cards for PhysX/CUDA and an ATI card for graphics. That's enough to turn me into an ATI fanboy. Also try using Nvidia's binary blob drivers in Linux and tell me how standby/hibernate works for you (SPOILERS: either not at all, or if you're lucky, with a performance hit and tearing issues).
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I worry about this too.
Blizzard keeps pushing back the release dates for Diablo III and Starcraft II. Those titles would really revitalize PC gaming. Blizzard has the resources to bang them out...but they're stalling for some reason.
Maybe some of it is the economy...maybe they're waiting for the market to open up. They're also addressing the piracy problem by forcing players to use Battle.net to play those games...something which involves more infrastructure work on their end...and bandwidth is as expensive as ever.
Then there's another issue.
When you look at the demographics, the majority of potential Diablo III and Starcraft II gamers are already playing WoW. Nobody is going to pay for 2 subscription games at once...Blizzard knows this, so that isn't an option for them. I know plenty of people who would cancel their WoW accounts for 3-6 months to play D3 alone. Blizzard may be worried about shooting themselves in the foot. It hardly serves them to release new games when it causes their customers to cancel their WoW subs. We've seen how stifling WoW's success has been to the MMORPG market, ironically WoW may be stifling Blizzard too.
It seems they have a lot of non-technical problems with very few obvious solutions. It's a bummer.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
It's Microsoft's fault. They have now, single handedly, broken their own market. No longer do we need to upgrade our PCs, or our PC graphics cards, or even our OS. No, now all we need to do is get on the bandwagon and buy an XBox console, which has a lifespan of about 5 years.
So instead of spending $2,000+ on a PC with a $400+ graphics card (every two years) and a new OS every 5 years, now we just spend $400 and buy a bunch of games at $50 to $60 dollars a pop.
Hmm, I wonder how that worked out business wise? Let's dwell on that...
1. Major PC vendors markets: Dell, HP, Sony, Lenovo, Gateway, etc? Destroyed. Now they end up selling a bunch of low-end netbooks and cheap $500 PCs, enough for browsing the web, watching videos, listening to music, etc.
2. High end $400+ video graphic cards market from nVidia and AMT/ATI. Destroyed. Nope, who needs a video card that a game doesn't use. After all, all games are now made for consoles, and the consoles are all over 4 years old!
3. 64 bit multi-core computing for home? Destroyed. After all, who needs multi-core computing except for the business and science/eng/tech sectors? A 32 bit (aka 4G RAM) computer works just fine for the internet, office, and financial management of home users. Ok, some may need to edit photo's and movies, I'll grant that.
The problem is that the Microsoft business manager bean counters just didn't think the problem through. The PC gaming market was pushing the technology envelope forward, for better or worse. And all other vendors and software markets (aka the Windows eco system) benefited from those gains. Later they realized, uh oh!, we are shooting ourselves in the foot, and tried to keep it going with "Games for Windows". Little did they realize, by that time, it was all over.
I may never buy another PC, or graphics card again. Someone please explain why I should? Does the amortization of costs actually benefit us over the long run? Stuck with 4 to 5 year old console technology that does not push the envelope? Unlike some slashdotters, from a game, I want a total and absolute simulated environmenal realism. I don't just want to "play a game". I can muck around with Monopoly if I just wanted to "play a game". No I want to be emersed, as if I have been taken to another world. Games must be worth my time, not just something to fidget around with while I'm bored. I want photo-realism, possibly ray traced real time graphics, with true weather and environmental sounds. That's the goal I "was" chasing. That "was" the goal I was helping by buying the latest and greatest tech. But now, Microsoft has just killed that goal for me.
Side note: It seems all vendors of all types now from cell phones, to PC hardware and software, are all hell bent on getting every living being on the planet on some kind of subscription service. To that I say "One Time Cost" is better than the "Recurring Cost" model.
Yes kids, the card is FAST, but the better news is DirectX 11 support and the ability to run up to 3 displays at high resolutions.
Tom's Hardware has some metrics on overclocking and power consumption in their review, BTW.
At $600 MSRP, this is not a cheap card, but the performance is pretty amazing.
I'm still using an nVidia 8800 in my primary PC and a 7600 in my backup box, and both do OK with most games. I should point out that I don't have Crysis or many of the games used for benchmarks, with the exception of Left 4 Dead (1 and 2).
COD2, the L4D's, and Borderlands all run fine on my current setups, so I'll wait until something dies before I look at a new nVidia or ATI card.
I am my own gestalt.
It's funny that PC Pro says the card is 13" long when TFA (Hothardware) says in its review that the hardware they were reviewing was 12" long.
Of course, I imagine there will be some variances between card manufacturers, but 1" of variance seems a lot.
Don't you know that the speed of computing operates on the same principles as driving? Of course you'll get to work faster in a Lamborghini than in a Corolla, because more horsepower means you can really drive the hell out of every 5 foot gap in bumper-to-bumper traffic.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
That would make sense, except that in a computer the "cars" never stop moving. Ever.
bonaparte here. napoleon bonaparte.
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if you are a power user, all you need to do is to acquire alternative drivers instead of Ati's. a power user would be able to use them without any issues. not only that, s/he would be able to use the cards every bit and byte on every single chip and feature.
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In holland CE Edition of Dragon Age PC cost me less from Bart Smith Online then the console version.
Oh and I got better graphics.
And modding tools.
And mods.
But sure, you go play with your console, you posting this from anyone of them? Oh, so you need a PC AND a console? I only need a PC.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Why does nobody ever seem to benchmark stuff like this with GPGPU apps? Would be nice to see how it performs on something that can really tax it...
Unless they need some sort of user input, or there are set time delays for non-technical reasons. Then they stop until you tell them to go.
Very few people actually use their computers in such a way that their ability to go forever makes one bit of difference.
If it takes me an hour to complete a task, what difference does it really make whether my computer spends 90% of that time waiting for me to press another button, or 10% of that time waiting for me to press another button? So long as I spend no more of my time waiting for the computer to respond to the button I pushed, the answer is none.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.