Fastest Graphics Ever, Asus ARES Rips Benchmarks

MojoKid writes "Over-the-top, killer graphics cards are always fun to play with, though they may not be all that practical. With a pair of ATI Radeon HD 5870 GPUs on a single PCB and 4GB of GDDR5 graphics memory on board, the recently released Asus ARES is one such card that can currently claim the title of being the fastest single gaming graphics card on the planet. This dual-GPU-infused beast rips through benchmarks, besting even the likes of a Radeon HD 5970 or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480. You can even run a pair of them in CrossFire mode, if you're hell-bent on the fastest frame rates money can buy currently."

Comments

OpenCL?

[im_thatoneguy]

Yeah but what about OpenCL performance?

Some of Anandtech's Fermi benchmarks put it 4x+ behind in GPGPU tests.

Re:OpenCL?

[BikeHelmet]

Folding seems to indicate the same. nVidia's recent changes to their architecture boosted power consumption, but made double-precision floating point ops about 4x faster. Good for GPGPU, but not so good for games. (which don't really use double-precision floating point)

Re:OpenCL?

[makomk]

I seem to recall that the double-precision performance of NVidia's latest graphics cards would've been truly impressive... if they hadn't intentionally crippled it on all of the gaming cards in order to force people to buy compute cards costing several times the price. Works out that double precision runs at 1/8th of the speed of single precision - the same ratio as the previous generation - as opposed to 1/5th on ATI Radeon hardware and 1/2 on NVidia's really expensive professional cards.

5890 Ultra

[Anonymous Coward]

So it's actually a ATI Radeon 5890 Ultra. You will be cheaper off buying two discrete 5870 cards and running them in Crossfire. Thermals will be better and thus you will be able to overclock them further.

Am I a cheap bastard?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Asus ARES commands a hefty $1200 MSRP.

What the fuck

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[mangu]

I can't believe anyone still tries to bring up the old "human eye doesn't see beyond 30fps so anything higher is useless" mantra. It has been debunked a hundred times.

I can't believe anyone has seen a spoked wheel in a movie and never wondered why it rotates backwards.

This "debunking" shown in your first link is not showing the difference between 30 fps and 60 fps. Considering the fourfold symmetry of the rotating square, what it's actually demonstrating is that 7.5 fps looks choppier than 15 fps.

There will always exist some particular geometries that will appear choppy at any frame rate. The right way to make it smooth is not by increasing the frame rate, but by motion blur.

As for your second link, it proves exactly the opposite of what it meant to: there's no practical difference between 24 fps and 60 fps. They are using the same arguments audiophiles use to justify paying $500 for a network cable: I have eyes/ears that are so much more accurate than yours that I wouldn't be satisfied with that cheap gear you use.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[asdf7890]

1) 30fps is a joke and not anywhere near a playable framerate

FPS is one of those subjective issues where there seems to be a lot more "I don't like X so you are daft for suggesting someone might" then hard facts.

For lot of people 30fps is perfectly fine if it is a minimum rate rather than an average. A lot of people talk at cross purposes on this one, the "30 is fine" crowd assuming that the people looking for 100fps+ when there monitor probably refreshes at 60Hz are daft and want 100+fps everywhere and the "30 is no were near enough" crowd thinking that the 30fpss would be happy with 30 on average. For games that require decent graphics hardware the demand on that hardware can vary a lot, so a card that gets 30pfs in some areas will drop below 15fps in others, likewise that card that pushes 100Hz in the lighter scenes may drop below 50 on the really heavy ones.

So any quote of an fps requirement or recommendation is completely useless unless you qualify the figure in more detail.

Another factor that needs to be considered is screen size. An object moving from one side of the screen to the other at the same framerate is going to look smoother on an smaller monitor than it'll look on a full-wall projector (unless of course you are far away from said wall, to the point where it is effectively the same size as the small monitor in terms of how it appear on the back of your eye). How far objects on the display travel between frames is what needs to be measured, not just how many frames there are in a given time. This brings up another point as to why this sort of thing is subjective and difficult to sound reasonable discussing (without so much supporting detail that you bore people to death) - it very much depends on what games you play and how you play them.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[hairyfeet]

I hate to burst your bubble buddy, but as a PC builder and repairman I've met a few gamers which will probably buy this thing. All they care about is having the biggest ePeen at ALL costs, one even gave me the cash up front to score him a Skulltrail when THAT was the biggest ePeen board, and had me wire his whole system up to a massive watercooler. Crazy bastard was even paying for the fastest cable PLUS the fastest DSL, and had me set him up dual KillerNICs so he could switch between the two so he would always have the fastest ping. Some folks blow money on cars, he blew it on his ePeen.

That said as much as I hate consoles (or as I call them DRM...in a box) I have to give them credit for lowering the cost of PC gaming in a major way. It used to be back in the days of Quake 1-3 I'd be buying a new card yearly and a new PC every other just to keep decent framerate, but thanks to console R&D becoming crazy expensive and MSFT and Sony stretching out the time the current model stays on market it really has made things cheaper for those of us that don't care about ePeens and just want to play. Now I'm playing on an AMD quad (925, 8Gb of DDR2 800, dual 500Gb for less than $650) with an HD4650 that cost me a whole $36 after MIR and it plays the games I want like Bioshock 2 just fine on this 1600x900 monitor. Thanks to the consoles slowing down the need to constantly upgrade I just built a new gaming rig for my guitarist, and the whole dual core rig set him back just $400 after MIR at Tigerdirect.

So if guys want to go nuts with ePeens that is fine and dandy with me, for those of us with GFs or kids or other expenses that just want to enjoy blowing some shit up after a day of work the current situation makes me VERY happy. And the extras you can do with these newer GPUs, like hardware transcoding even on my 4xxx, is really a nice bonus. and unlike my old Nvidia rig it doesn't sound like a jet engine or heat up my place in the summer. Win/win as far as this old greybeard is concerned.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[vbraga]

Lord, thank you for the $500 network cable Google search. My life changed after reading Amazon comments:

http://www.amazon.com/Denon-AKDL1-Dedicated-Link-Cable/product-reviews/B000I1X6PM

I knew my day was going to improve when the truck pulled up at my home with this cable deep within. No ordinary truck, this one was Holy White, and the gold Delivery logo sparkled like a thousand suns reflected through shards of the purest ice formed with unadulterated water collected at the beginning of the universe. The driver, clad in a robe colored the softest of white, floated towards me on the cool fog of a hundred fire extinguishers. He smiled benevolently, like a father looking down upon his only child, and handed me a package wrapped in gold beaten thin to the point where you could see through it. I didn't have to sign, because the driver could see within my heart, and knew that I was pure. Upon opening the package, an angelic choir started to sing, and reached a crescendo as I laid this cable on my stereo system. Instantly, my antiquated equipment transformed into components made from the clearest diamond-semiconductor. The cable knew where to go, and hooked itself into the correct ports without help from me - all the while, the choir sang praises to the almighty digital god. With trepidation, I pushed "play," and was instantly enveloped in a sound that echoed the creation of all matter, a sound that vibrated every cell in my body to perfection. I was instantly taken to the next plane, where I saw the all-father. I knew with my entire soul, that all was good in the world.

But then I realized the cable was blue, so I only gave it one star. I hate blue.

Almost all comments - joking or not - are very funny.

Re:Am I a cheap bastard?

[KingMotley]

First 30 FPS is probably too low for a FPS because you are likely stating what the FPS is when you are motionless and in one particular spot. Now, replay a few matches and tell us what your minimum frame rate was, and I best it's in the very low teens or worse. That isn't acceptable, and you are more likely to lag when the action gets thick and you need your FPS the most.

Secondly, Crysis/Crysis Warhead is a 3 year old engine that's a generation behind. Of course playing games from 3 years ago play fine on $100 video cards, but those cards would have been the $600+ cards 3 years ago too. Try picking at least a current gen game.

And lastly, 1680x1050? My LCD's native resolution has been 1920x1200 since I got it 5 years ago. Try getting a decent monitor.

Playing old games on low resolution monitors and cherry picking frame rates only proves how wrong you are.

Re:Linux?

[gazbo]

Dude, Nethack fucking SCREAMS. As long as you install the proprietary binary drivers.

Why this doesn't matter

[Anonymous Coward]

This was over the top, totally bonkers, hilariously exaggerated just 10 years ago. With not two but 5 of the hottest graphics processors of the time on one board, it would smoke the competition in any benchmark (particularly Bungholiomark). Now tell me, what good would five times the performance of a ten year old card do in one of today's games? The ASUS ARES is just as ridiculous, but it's real and they expect you to pay real money for it. If you do that, the joke is on you.

Flying fuck.

[Anonymous Coward]

How relevant is that for a gaming card?

Remember, this is a product that comes with a GAMING MOUSE thrown in. It's like asking how much of a load the latest supercar can haul. It's irrelevant, as long as there's no games using OpenCL. Trust me, when OpenCL is a big thing in gaming, these cards will be long forgotten.

what's the point of the briefcase?

[MoFoQ]

sure...it's cool..but at the same time...gimmicky..
once I install the card...it stays in the there and not in the briefcase.

And the "gaming mouse"....I'm sorry, I like my G5 (rev 2).

Plus the price makes it un-attractive.

Re:Linux?

[V!NCENT]

Oh yeah sorry... I forgot to mention that that engine is actually used to make this commercial game that is comming to Linux: http://www.primalcarnage.com/website/