Hello,

Well, it's that time of the year again.

ATI launched their new generation DirectX11 graphics cards couple of weeks ago. It's always exciting when a new generation graphics cards are launched. But this was little different. We were all expecting this, and from all the media leaks that happened over past few months, we were also expecting this to be a good product.

Approximately 5 months back ATI announce that they will have DX11 product ready and available for purchase before Windows 7 hits retail, and they delivered on that promise. Little over 3 months back we got the official announcement of the ATI's Evergreen family, and today we can buy these products in retails.



I am bringing you the review of XFX HD 5870 1GB DDR5 graphics card which will be the flagship single GPU card in ATI's Evergreen family.

It has been a commendable effort from ATI and their partners who had a tough time , keeping up with their time table in past. So a product on time is always a good sign to begin with.







[BREAK=Specifications and Features]



Specifications and Features





Today I am bringing you the detailed review of XFX HD 5870 graphics card which is built around ATI's RV870 aka Cypress GPU.

Lets have a quick look at pure numbers.







The first obvious thing that anyone will notice that almost everything is doubled from HD4890 while making HD5870. AMD didn't bother with complete change in its chip design. It made few clever changes to incorporate DX11 hardware requirements and doubles everything else and released the HD5870.

It may not be the most innovative approach, but it has made sure that they get the product out on time. HD4890was no pushover, so you can get an idea what kind of beast this card will be by just looking at specification sheet.



Also the changes are not limited to gaming horsepower. This card gets new HDMI 1.3a which can output both images and full surround sound as well. In addition to this, it can now drive 3 displays at one time. Ati is calling this Eyefinity. This is potentially a really cool feature to have for flight simulator and flight combat fan like me. Unfortunately I dont have such display setup at this moment. But who knows I might just get one now



This card is 100% DX11 card. Here is a quick look at the DX11 features and benefits of SM5.













Let's take a look at the architecture.



[BREAK=Architecture]



Architecture



As this is the first article here about this new generation GPU, I will try to explain the new Terascale 2 architecture of Cypress in as simple words as possible. But keep in mind that this is highly technical and of no use to a gamer

If you are not interested, you can skip this and move on. Most of this stuff is taken from AMD's press material.



ATI's new 'Terascale 2' architecture is not completely revolutionary. Its a refined, more effecient evolutionary architecture derived from its previous generation GPU.



ATI worked closely with Microsoft in the DirectX development and DirectX11 which we will see in Windows 7.



ATI and NVIDIA took completely different paths last time around. Nvidia went ahead and built a brute force GT200 chip which was strictly DX10 chip. ATI on the other hand decided to go different path and incorporated many things that we see in DX11 in its last generation chip itself. This is the key here, and ATI's decision to make a DX10.1 chip is now paying off. This is the reason they have DirectX product ready and available for sale today.

Lets first take a look as Cypress SPU.







ATI has done the necessary modification to the RV770 to meet the DX11 requirements. They have introduces the required instruction and modified the way the instructions are executed to improve performance. Many dot product computation are now done in 1 cycle. They have added DX11 requirements like insert, count, extract operations. Denormal numbers are now handled at full speed and they have added the SAD (Sum of Absolute Differences ) instruction. This plays vital role in improving video encoding performance by factor of 2 and more.







The SIMDs of Cypress looks identical to RV770 at first look, but there are many changes here as well.

Interpolation is now done by SPs as a part of DX11 pull mode which has resulted in increased fillrate compared to last generation. SIMDs can now also handle compressed AA colour buffers making better use of the available bandwidth.

But the major performance upgrade that we see in Cypress is because of the pure increase in the number of SIMDs. There are now 20SIMDs as you can see in the picture above which is twice as much as RV770. It's a simple solution, but it works.







And as SIMD's have been doubled, the L2 cache feeding these have also been doubled in size to 128K and Cypress also sees the Global dada share of 64K up from 16K of RV770.



Here is a complete picture showing the Cypress architecture.





ROPs have also been doubled to 32 and they are also enhanced and tweaked to increase performance. Finally the ATI's graphics engine you see in the architecture picture has been tweaked to comply with DX11 requirements.



[BREAK=Memory Controller, Image Quality and UVD 2]



Memory Controller







The memory controller on Cypress has been tweaked as well. It is still 256bit GDDR5 memory interface but with few key addition.



1. EDC (Error Detection Code)

2. GDDR5 Memory Clock Temperature compensation.

3. Fast GDDR5 Link Retraining



Most critical change is addition of EDC (Error detection code) which basically performs CRC checks on the memory data transfer and helps reduce the errors. This has allowed AMD to clock the RAM higher without too many errors.





Image Quality



AMD have been touting the image quality card in press. The Anisotropic Filtering is now angle independent resulting in near perfect AF.



To test this, I used the Filter Test application V1.3. Better filtering should have perfect circles and as you can see, ATI was not kidding. The result is best we have seen in past couple of generations.









Universal Video Decoder 2.0





The ATI UVD is back and it has been tweaked and enhanced as well. Hardware acceleration for H.264 and VC1 high definition video is present just like its predecessor.

But now it now adds dual stream video decoding capability. I honestly can think of only one application for this and that's the multi window PIP functionality which is there is new BR standard.

There is also an option for Dynamic Range in CCC now which is basically Dynamic contrast option. We had seen this in NVIDIA cards in the past, but it's now available on this hardware as well.

This card also has been upgraded to HDMI 1.3a standard.

Other than that, nothing much to say at this point. I will be writing a detailed GPU video encoding and decoding article in the near future, and this will be discussed in more detail then.



Ok enough of tech talk, let's move onto the cool stuff. Plenty of pictures over next few pages.



56K users are warned



[BREAK=XFX HD5870 1GB Pictures]



XFX Radeon HD5870 1GB Pictures



The box









The backside of the box







Inner Box









Accessories









[BREAK=XFX Radeon HD5870 1GB Pictures 2]

XFX Radeon HD5870 1GB Pictures 2

The card is massive. It measures 27cms making it the biggest card in the modern era. Its slightly bigger than GTX295 and 4870x2.

Here are the pictures, enjoy.





The beast measuring 27cms









Front View of the card

This is probably the best looking HD5870 out there thanks to good art work.









Back of the card







Top View











The Batmobile





The output ports



The card ships with 2 DVI, 1 HDMI 1.3a and a Displayport. Every card is capable of driving 3 displays simultaneously.







[BREAK=XFX Radeon HD5870 Pictures 3]



XFX Radeon HD5870 Pictures 3



Heatsink taken apart









Front of the PCB









Back of the PCB







Front PCB with all goop cleaned.







[BREAK=XFX Radeon HD5870 Pictures 4]



XFX Radeon HD5870 Pictures 4



The GPU Core

This is what makes everything happen. Pic taken with Rs.5 coin for the comparison.









The Volterra Chip and power supply section







The display connectors on PCB









Samsung GDDR5 Memory Chip







That's it for the pics. Lets move onto the test setup.





[BREAK=Test Setup & How we Tested]

Test Setup



We have the Intel's i7 platform as a test bench.



Processor : Intel Xeon W3520 overclocked to 4.2Ghz

Ram : 6GB OCZ Platinum at 1600Mhz 7-7-7-20

Motherboard : Gigabyte X58 UD5

Power Supply : Tagan BZ1300

Optical Drive : LG GGW-H20N BlueRay Drive

Operating System : Windows 7 Ultimate X64



Its a standard i7 platform with decent overclock on the processor to eliminate the processor limitations as much as possible. The W3520 is equivalent to i7 920. These are identical chips in every way. The Xeons are usually better binned product. Other than that, there is no difference between i7 920 and W3520.







How we tested.



Each benchmark was repeated at least 3 times to ensure we were getting consistent results.

I did not bother benching this card at lower resolutions. There is no point to it to be honest as you will see that even 1920x1080 Full HD resolution is no big deal for such high end card.

All the games were patched to the latest versions and Windows was fully patched as well.



Let's move onto the benchmarks.

[BREAK=FarCry 2]

FarCry 2







This game is based on Dunia Engine by Ubisoft and does not use original crytek engine of Far Cry 1

This game is somewhat of a mixed bag, entertaining at times but not meant for everyone as those who don’t like long drives in the game that are just that, driving for long time from location A to B and nothing more. Some people hate it, some love it. But we cant ignore it at the moment.



The game is not really too heavy on high end GFX cards unless you really crank up the details to Ultra High settings. That is exactly what we did here as we are testing a high end card. We set everything to Ultra High and ran the benchmark tool built into the game.







The XFX HD5870 really shows what it is made of right from the word go. The performance is impressive even at 8xAA.



[BREAK=Tom Clancy's HAWX]



Tom Clancy's HAWX







Well I am a huge fan of flight sims and flight combat games. And I haven't missed many. But unfortunately we have had very poor games in past and the good ones were very rare.

HAWX however is in class of its own. Graphically, this is the best flight game I have ever played. Its impressive detailed terrain, cities, special effects, explosions are top notch and very well done. Its pure treat on eyes if you have the hardware to play the game.

This game is also one of the few to support DX10.1.

All in game details were cranked up to highest level and DX10.1 was enabled for HD5870. Games in built benchmark was used.









What is impressive to see in this game is very little hit in performance when going from 4xAA to 8XAA.



[BREAK=STALKER Clear Sky]

STALKER Clear Sky







This is the prequel of the Stalker SOC. This game didn’t receive many exceptionally good reviews. But it is really nice game and with DX10 enabled this game really looks great. Specially lighting effects are amazing.



I used FRAPS for benchmarking, and all details were maxed out and games AA sliders were pushed to right . This makes game unplayable on any last generation single GPU graphics card and that's clearly visible here with GTX280 really struggling to break 20FPS.







But HD5870 is the first single GPU card I have tested to be able to play this game in DX10 mode with AA and AF enabled.



[BREAK=World In Conflict]



World In Conflict









World in conflict is one of the best strategy games out there. The graphics and game-play both are absolutely stunning, and it’s one of the games that is really CPU and GPU intensive. CPU proves to be the major roadblock in this game. You really need to crank up the CPU clock to get the best results.



We used game’s in build benchmark system. For this test, the graphics setting were set to very high in the game. AA and AF settings were set from the game menu.







HD5870 enjoys healthy lead over last generation GTX 280.





[BREAK=Batman Arkham Asylum]

Batman Arkham Asylum







Traditionally, all super hero and comic based games had been nothing short of pure crap. But finally, we have a great game based on Batman. The graphics are good, the game play is good, controls are simple and easy to get used to.

This game however has one big issue. NVIDIA has put lot of its marketing power behind this game and this shows in the game as well. This game supports PhysX and disables a lot of stuff when Nvidia card with PhysX enabled is not detected. It also does not support the ATI AA method and only supports Nvidia SS AA.

ATI cards can still do AA when its forced from the CCC, but this is regular un optimised full screen Anti Aliasing and gives irregular FPS results on ATI hardware. Anti aliasing works just fine, but the performance drop is huge compared to Nvidia. But just for the sake of testing this game with good eye candy, I forced the AA and AF on HD5870 from CCC.

So take these numbers with little pinch of salt. Also I did not use game's built in benchmark. I used the Fraps to benchmark the two fights you get yourself into at the beginning of the game.









Even with unoptimised AA, it is still performs very well despite taking huge hit in performance.



[BREAK=Anno 1404 - Dawn of Discovery]

Anno 1404 - Dawn of Discovery







This is the new game I am including for the first time in the benchmarking suit. This is the latest sequel for the Anno series. This game was included here by popular demand of our members

This RTS game has some beautiful graphics which are usually uncommon to the RTS, the whole game feels alive and buzzing. And its great fun to build a thriving metropolis starting from a small village.

I used Fraps to benchmark this game and all in game details were maxed out.

HD5870 driver does have a bug at this point. Some textures are displayed in black. I don't know if this affects the performance, so expect a follow-up on this when ATI releases a driver fix for the game. But if its just a bug that does not cause any artificial performance boost, then the performance of HD5870 is nothing short of astonishment.







This game is heavy on CPU and GPUs alike, and most high end cards from last generation struggle when you use full zoom when AA and AF is enabled. But HD5870 was butter smooth in this game with exceptionally high FPS. Hopefully same is the case after driver bug is fixed. I will keep you guys updated.

[BREAK=Crysis Warhead]

Crysis Warhead







Last but not the least. This game and its predecessor Crysis has been a permanent feature in my reviews, and it still finds place here and deservingly so.

It is still one of the hardest game on your system and its still one of the best looking games out there visually.

I used HardwareOC benchmark tool and Airstrip demo for this benchmarks. Very High preset was used for benchmarking.







The great thing to observe is absolutely no loss in game performance between 4x and 8x AA on this card with my setup. Finally Warhead is playable on a single GPU card with everything maxed out and 8xAA.



[BREAK=3DMark Vantage]

3DMark Vantage



Well, this is the only synthetic benchmarking tool I will be using for comparison purpose only. The HD5870 gives phenomenal results in this benchmark by easily crossing 17k without any overclock.







This is huge jump in GPU score for a single GPU card.









[BREAK=Overclocking, Noise, Temperatures]

Overclocking.



The overclocking potential of the HD5870 at this point seems to be limited. This in my opinion is largely because of the voltage settings used on the card by ATI at the moment.

The card does have Volterra VT1157SF which means we will be able to adjust the voltages and get more juice out of this.

Unfortunately the new version of AMD GPU overclock tool released by AMD was still unable to clock this particular card above 900Mhz core and 1300 Mhz memory.

There is an option to crossflash the card with different bios. But due to lack of time, I am not able to include those results in this article.







But card was 100% stable at 900/1300 and because of some bug either with GPU overclocking utility or drivers, it was crashing immediately at 901 Mhz on my setup. I will try to update this review once I get some more time to play with the card.



Temperature and Noise



The card runs cool considering what's under the hood of this beast.

In 2D Windows mode, the clock speeds of CPU and memory are pulled way down which keeps it really cool. 2D clock speeds are 157Mhz for core and 300Mhz for memory which meant the card was usually around 35-36°C idle and was dead silent

In 3D, the card seems to stabilize at 78°C full load which is not too bad for GPUs these days. This was with completely automatic fan control. Even at this stage the card's fan didn't make much noise.

You can manually adjust the fan speed from Catalyst Control Centre and anything up to 45% was ok even in open case environment. And it dropped the card temperatures by good 7-8 degrees at full load.



So no complains in this department to be honest.

[BREAK=Conclusion]

Conclusion



At the end of the day, this is the most powerful single GPU card on the planet right now. Performance in phenomenal and it will only get better with time and driver updates looking at the history of ATI.

ATI has done a commendable job in getting the GPU out in time and available to masses even before Windows 7 is officially launched. And this will keep their shareholders, partners like XFX and users happy. They didn't mess around too much and created a good product which basically evolved from already successful RV770.

Currently this product does not have any real market competition and even then it's not priced too badly. Hopefully over time the prices will come down making this already well priced monster even more affordable.

I can't seriously find anything wrong with this card. Its huge in size, but people who are going to buy this will have decent mid tower cabinets, and it does fit even in budget mid tower cabinets with ease.

Sure the other camp is yet to roll out their DirectX11 counterpart, but that still looks few weeks away and until then, ATI is going to enjoy its market position. They are also in a position where even game developers developing the DX11 titles will be using their hardware as a base at this moment. So many games will be designed around this chip. This is almost a DéjÃ* Vu of Radeon 9700 launch. But this time around, it's almost certain NVIDIA won't make as big a blunder as they did with Geforce FX.

This means we have an exciting Q4 2009 and Q1 2010 ahead of us. The other siblings in the Evergreen family are on their way as well. And I am really not going to bother with usual Pro's and Con's list as at the moment as there are no real cons.





Suggested Product Retail Price : Rs.25,000/-







My Score Card



Features : 9/10

Performance : 10/10

Value For Money : 9/10

Overall : 9.5/10











Hopefully you guys enjoyed reading this review. Please post your comments and feedbacks and please Digg this review.



DIGG Link : XFX Radeon HD5870 1GB Review



Shripad signing out.





Thanks to XFX and Rashi Peripherals for lending this excellent product to me for the review.

@Shripad - The graph in 3dmark Vantage on page 17 is incorrect



You will need to switch the CPU and GPU scores.



Otherwise, a great review all-round