The Official HD 5800 Series Review thread

[AlexV]

I'm talking about memory bandwidth Jim, not internal chip bandwidth.

It's not that simple, IMHO.

[razor1]

the HD5870 double the AA resolves and double the samples per clock too thats where the AA performance probably shows up.

[jolle]

I'm liking the tessellation stuff, though how does it do it, and is there a performance loss for it?

I mean it must obviously have advantages to just making a higher polygon object or there would be no point to it.

Not sure on performance and stuff.
But its a way around sending massive amounts of data (very high res meshes) to the video card though.
Especially if you use displacement mapping to controll the tesselation and deformation, think thats pretty comon in offline rendering, to save render time by using a lower subdiv with a dispmap generated from the highest subdiv level, with all the finest detail in it.

As is, you just smoothing things out I guess, which may cause some wierd results if certain edges arent flagged as sharp, some things are ment to have sharp edges, like mechanical stuff, but I guess there are ways of defining these so they dont get all rounded out.
A great usage would be on.. a game like Prototype for example, you have a ton of very low poly dudes running around, you could realtime scale these up and down in poly count depending on distance to camera, so they´d be smoother up close.

[jam2k]

Added hardware.info with Tri-Xfire benchies.

Stalker Clear Sky shows a nice boost.

[Sound_Card]

It's not that simple, IMHO.

The only other explanation I can think of other then bandwidth and drivers is perhaps RV870 is set up limited.

[koralis]

I'm liking the tessellation stuff, though how does it do it, and is there a performance loss for it?

I mean it must obviously have advantages to just making a higher polygon object or there would be no point to it.

The tessellation allows the game maker to include high-detail models and not have to worry if it will kill the performance on low-end hardware (that includes tessellation support.)



Example 1: Take 10 of those models shown on a 5870. It works great. Take 10 of those detailed models as-is (no tessellation) on a low end part... it runs like a dog. Enable tesselation on the low-end part, and the model gets scaled-down to a polygon count that the low-end part can handle at decent speed.



Example 2: You already created the high-detail model. Now you'd like to create a scenario with 100 of those guys in an aircraft hanger. In the past, you'd have to create a low-poly version of that model to fit this sceen. With tessellation, you can reuse that model and it will automatically drop the polygon count to something reasonable for the scene.



From a GDC talk I saw the slides from, I think they also mentioned that the tessellation was fairly smart too... figures more distant from the viewer didn't need as many polygons to look decent, while nearer ones can get more, etc.


Exciting stuff. Other DX features

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=134449

[Destroy]

I think they got this one mixed up, DX 11 looks like it is the one on the left:

Yeah, it has to be backwards.

[razor1]

Example 2: You already created the high-detail model. Now you'd like to create a scenario with 100 of those guys in an aircraft hanger. In the past, you'd have to create a low-poly version of that model to fit this sceen. With tessellation, you can reuse that model and it will automatically drop the polygon count to something reasonable for the scene.

you still use the low polygon model, tesselation breaks the models polygons into smaller polygons, which is camara angle and distance related. Then the rest of the shader uses bump map to bump out the model AKA hieght maps.


When you cut down polys from a model thats called decimation.

[OlderBudweiser]

Anyone can tell me how i would notice if my CPU forms a bottleneck?

[razor1]

Easiest way is to increase or decrease the resolution and see what the % of performance change you have vs the % of resolution change. But of course if the GPU fillrates, shaders are the bottleneck the % change will also be effected.

testing out different settings is the easiest way to see where the bottleneck is and how much of the bottleneck is situated at what part.

[badsykes]

Did anyone notice that so called DX10 games and DX11 ones have a specific commom colour applied everywhere
I was playing this days Resident Evil 5 and in the ruins level got this deja vu and also when i saw the new Stalker DX11 pics.

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,695861/Stalker-Call-of-Pripyat-The-first-DirectX-11-screenshots/News/&menu=browser&entity_id=217981&image_id=1197513&article_id=695861&page=1&show=original

In this image the soft feeling and the colour feeling of the ground and the walls is pretty present in this kind of games...Either i become alergic to this effect either i got very bored of it and it feels too artificial for my brain..

[NIGELG]

W.
T.
F.

r u crak mang?

Are you surprised??With every launch you'll see rabid fanboys of both camps coming out to fight for their beloved brands.

[kaarel]

Did anyone notice that so called DX10 games and DX11 ones have a specific commom colour applied everywhere
I was playing this days Resident Evil 5 and in the ruins level got this deja vu and also when i saw the new Stalker DX11 pics.

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,695861/Stalker-Call-of-Pripyat-The-first-DirectX-11-screenshots/News/&menu=browser&entity_id=217981&image_id=1197513&article_id=695861&page=1&show=original

In this image the soft feeling and the colour feeling of the ground and the walls is pretty present in this kind of games...Either i become alergic to this effect either i got very bored of it and it feels too artificial for my brain..

Soft-shadows is actually two steps forward and one step backward. Shadows become "soft" when they are realtively far away from the object that is casting them. But when part of the shadow is closer to the object it needs to be sharper. Sadly it seems to be impossible to attain with current tech.

[OlderBudweiser]

Yep, you were right. The character with Tessellation is the one with perfect poly.

I flipped horizontal that image

Is it me or am i not seeing that much of a difference here??Except for the clouds?

[SIrPauly]

Is it me or am i not seeing that much of a difference here??Except for the clouds?

If you look at the gas mask aspect -- you will see that it is not rounded and more block like -- to offer a quick example.

[spirits247]

If you look at the gas mask aspect -- you will see that it is not rounded and more block like -- to offer a quick example.

The return of Truform. My 8500 could do that back in say, 2001/2.

DX11 does have some nice improvements, but we'll have to wait and see how much this step means in actual games when hopefully we can switch between 9/10/11.

[Nebuchadnezzar]

Is it me or am i not seeing that much of a difference here??Except for the clouds?

It's you.

[badsykes]

Soft-shadows is actually two steps forward and one step backward. Shadows become "soft" when they are realtively far away from the object that is casting them. But when part of the shadow is closer to the object it needs to be sharper. Sadly it seems to be impossible to attain with current tech.

Intersting..Really i prefer the DX9 way of stalker with no soft crap..It's like everything is kinda blured..Is any way to deactivate it?

[DSV-UltraGL]

Don't hold your breath on the 300....

why do i have the feeling that this going to be another Radeon 9700 vs GeForce 5800??!

[jolle]

Soft-shadows is actually two steps forward and one step backward. Shadows become "soft" when they are realtively far away from the object that is casting them. But when part of the shadow is closer to the object it needs to be sharper. Sadly it seems to be impossible to attain with current tech.

You mean like the "contact hardened shadows" thing they´ve been touting with DX11 in the upcoming STALKER?
Thats been done before aswell.
Hellgate´s DX10 implementation demoed a similar solution, and its been showcased elsewhere aswell

[curio]

DX11 does have some nice improvements, but we'll have to wait and see how much this step means in actual games when hopefully we can switch between 9/10/11.

I'm hoping there are performance improvements more than anything

[spyre]

You can already see the performance improvements on the first DX11 game 'Battleforge' vs DX10.1

Obviously as other DX11 games come along that will help

[{0}Salamander{0}]

Can anyone comment on how long the 5870 is compared to a 4870? I am just worried about it fitting into my case...

[caveman-jim]

It's longer.

Large pic (~3Mb) showing 4890, 5870 and GTX275 sizes.

[jolle]

It's longer.

Large pic (~3Mb) showing 4890, 5870 and GTX275 sizes.

Man, it seems like every time new graphics cards come out, they´re longer then the predecessors.
There has got to be some limit there before they wont fit in anything but the largest cases.
extrapolate 3 generations ahead and we´re there

[spyre]

It is 11.1" as I used my penis to measure it with and they were both the same

At least the power cables are in a better place unlike the 4890 so its less of a pain since you don't need the extra space for cables.

So I woulda thought it should still fit in your case.

[caveman-jim]

Who says its not?

[Tom|Nbk]

Had a day with my card now, well almost. Loving it, feels like a real step forward over the previous generation. Well done ATi!

[Wild Thing]

It is 11.1" as I used my penis to measure it with and they were both the same

At least the power cables are in a better place unlike the 4890 so its less of a pain since you don't need the extra space for cables.

So I woulda thought it should still fit in your case.

Geezus...another .9 of an inch and it would be a foot...not a penis...yikes!

[jolle]

So I woulda thought it should still fit in your case.

I hope you´re talking about the card there...
Yeah I´m not worried about MY case, plenty of space after removing one of the HD cages.
Just a general observation about a trend in graphics cards in general.

[{0}Salamander{0}]

Hmm, 11 inches might just about fit, just.

[becco]

Guru3D has CrossFire review

http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon-hd-5870-crossfirex-test-review/1

[Sasquach]

Hmm, 11 inches might just about fit, just.

thats what she said

[jam2k]

Guru3D has CrossFire review
http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon...-test-review/1

Thanks, added to the list.

Interesting:

GPU scaling; as this article has proven performance is downright banging... we have so much horsepower underneath that PC hood that games will start to become bottlenecked by an overclocked Core i7 processor, which is weird yet... sexy somehow. A CPU bottleneck is not necessarily a bad thing really, as games progress and develop to a more advance state, it will balance out evenly again. The one title that I hoped would scale a little better was Crysis Warhead, but still, the performance was really good regardless of that remark.

They used Core i7 @3.75Ghz

[Treeckcold57]

Thanks, added to the list.

Interesting:



They used Core i7 @3.75Ghz

Yeah, we need more serious horsepower multi-core CPU to feed this monster 5870, 5870 Crossfire, and 5870 CrossfireX setup.

[ThereIsASpoon]

Yeah, we need more serious horsepower multi-core CPU to feed this monster 5870, 5870 Crossfire, and 5870 CrossfireX setup.

There's one small problem with all these reviews...

None of them use Phenom2 cpus.

I'd like to see how these cards work with AMD cpus...

[Skynet]

I'd like to see how these cards work with AMD cpus...

I'll let you know, if I can ever find one in stock at a price that is not "you're gonna get raped"

[Sasquach]

I'll let you know, if I can ever find one in stock at a price that is not "you're gonna get raped"

Same here...

It'll be awhile before we see a price that isnt bending you over, taking your wallet and slapping you with it before taking your money and doing its business with it.

[ThereIsASpoon]

I'll let you know, if I can ever find one in stock at a price that is not "you're gonna get raped"

That quad core for 100 bucks.... doesn't sound like a rapist to me.

Heck, you can get the 940 for around 170. That's a lot of cpu power for a good price.

[kaarel]

You mean like the "contact hardened shadows" thing they´ve been touting with DX11 in the upcoming STALKER?
Thats been done before aswell.
Hellgate´s DX10 implementation demoed a similar solution, and its been showcased elsewhere aswell

That is good to hear but in those STALKER screenshots that feature is clearly not working.