ATI Radeon HD 5870 performance overview

After the NDA was lifted the web got flooded with ATI Radeon HD 5870 reviews this morning, lets pick out a few to see how these new DirectX 11 cards perform. First up we have a review from AnandTech, they conclude the Radeon HD 5870 is the fastest single-GPU card you can get. However, the reviewer says the card doesn't totally dominate the market because it fails to beat the GeForce GTX 295.

The catch however is that what we don’t have is a level of clear domination when it comes to single-card solutions. AMD was shooting to beat the GTX 295 with the 5870, but in our benchmarks that’s not happening. The 295 and the 5870 are close, perhaps close enough that NVIDIA will need to reconsider their position, but it’s not enough to outright dethrone the GTX 295. NVIDIA still has the faster single-card solution, although the $100 price premium is well in excess of the <10% performance premium.

Meanwhile AMD is retiring the 4870 X2, which ended up beating the 5870 enough that we would consider it a competitor to the 5870. However, you can’t consider it if you can’t buy it.

PC Perspective writes the Radeon HD 5870 will likely remain the fastest single-GPU card until the end of the year, and believes its the best card in the market.

There is no sense in trying to deny that the new ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB graphics card is incredibly fast and takes the lead as the fastest single-GPU card on the market. When we compare it to the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285, AMD's new Evergreen GPU bests it in every test with the exception of the new Batman title where the two cards are basically neck and neck. The largest performance gap we saw was in Far Cry 2 where the AMD driver team obviously spent a bit more time to get things where the hardware designers feel they should be. In fact, I am willing to give AMD another couple of weeks to produce better results in both Batman and Resident Evil 5 as both games were part of the NVIDIA "The Way It's Meant to be Played" network which usually results in a earlier access to builds and driver tweaks.

Another indepth test can be read at The Tech Report, this site praises the Radeon HD 5870 because it's the fastest GPU, with the best visual output, and the most compelling set of features.

Well, Sherlock, what do you expect me to say? AMD has succeeded in delivering the first DirectX 11 GPU by some number of months, perhaps more than just a few, depending on how quickly Nvidia can get its DX11 part to market. AMD has also managed to double its graphics and compute performance outright from one generation to the next, while ratcheting up image quality at the same time.

Last but not least we take a look at HardOCP's review, their conclusions are very similar. Seems like AMD has a winner on its hands.

Through all of this, Eyefinity, DX11, DirectCompute 11, OpenCL, the Radeon HD 5870 remains true to the focus of just being a desirable gaming video card. One of the most impressive "features" is the fact that it doubles performance, yet remains within the same power envelope as the previous generation. This is impressive. The fact that you can get all of this for around $379 makes it a really good value with a tremendous price/performance ratio compared to the previous generation.