AMD's Radeon HD 5870: Bringing About the Next Generation Of GPUs
by Ryan Smith on September 23, 2009 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
The First DirectX 11 Games
With any launch of a new DirectX generation of hardware, software availability becomes a concern. As the hardware needs to come before the software so that developers can tailor their games’ performance, it’s just not possible to immediately launch with games ready to go. For the launch of DirectX 11 and the 5800 series, AMD gave us a list of what games to expect and when.
First out of the gate is Battleforge, EA’s card-based online-only RTS. We had initially been told that it would miss the 5870 launch, but in fact EA and AMD managed to get it in under the wire and deliver it a day early. This gives AMD the legitimate claim of having a DX11 title out there that only their new hardware can fully exploit, and from a press perspective it’s nice to have something out there we can test besides tech demos. Unfortunately we wrapped up our testing 2 days early in order to attend IDF, which means we have not yet had a chance to benchmark this title’s DX11 mode or look at it in-depth.
We did have a chance to see the title in action quickly at AMD’s press event 2 weeks ago, where AMD was using it to show off High Definition Ambient Occlusion. As far as we can tell, HDAO is the only DX11 wonder-feature that it current implements, which makes sense given that it should be the easiest to patch in.
The next big title in AMD’s stack of DX11 games is STALKER: Call of Pripyat. This game went gold in Russia earlier this week, with the English version some time behind it. Unfortunately we don’t know what DX11 features it will be using, but as STALKER games have historically been hard on computers, it should prove to be an interesting test case for DX11 performance.
DIRT 2 is a title that got a great deal of promotion at AMD’s press event. AMD has been using it to show off their 6-way Eyefinity configuration, and we had a chance to play it quickly in their testing labs when looking at Eyefinity. This should be a fuller-featured DX11 game, utilizing tessellation, better shadow filtering, and other DX11 features. Certainly it’s the closest thing AMD’s going to have for a showcase title this year for the DX11 features of their hardware, and the console version has been scoring well in reviews. The PC version is due December 11th.
Finally, AMD had Rebellion Games in house to show off an early version of Aliens vs. Predator. This was certainly the most impressive title shown, with Rebellion showing off tessellation and HDAO in real time. Unfortunately screenshots don’t really do the game justice here; the difference from using DX11 is far more noticeable in motion. At any rate, this game is the farthest out – it won’t ship until Q1 of next year at the earliest.
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BoFox - Friday, November 6, 2009 - link
Yep, that's turning up LOD to -1 or -2 depending on which game. It was done in Crysis, and with LOD at -2, it looked sharp with SSAA.The Wasrad - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
Why are you using 4 gigs of ram with a 920?Do you understand how DDR3 memory works?
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
Error when writing the chart. It has been corrected.Sc4freak - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
Do you? The fact that the i7 920 works best in a triple-channel configuration has nothing to do with the fact that it uses DDR3.chizow - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
Agreed and to add to that, the fact the third channel means very little when it comes to actual gaming performance makes it even less signficant. As compared to Lynnfield clock for clock, which is only dual channel:http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...">http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...
Von Matrices - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
Could someone enlighten me as to why the 4870 X2 could be faster than the 5870 in some situations? It was noted it the article but never really explained. They have the same number of SP's, and one would expect crossfire scaling to be detrimental to the 4870 X2"s performance. Would this be indicative of the 5870 being starved for memory bandwidth in these situations or something else?Dobs - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
4870x2 has 2Gb of DDR55870 only has 1 until the 2Gb edition comes out :)
nafhan - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
Doesn't using dual GPU's effectively halve the onboard memory, as significant portions of the textures, etc. need to be duplicated? So, the 4870x2 has a memory disadvantage by requiring 2x memory to accomplish the same thing.chizow - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
Right, with an X2 each GPU has a copy of the same frame buffer, so the total memory onboard is effectively halved. A 2GB frame buffer with 2 GPU is two of the same 1GB frame buffer mirrored on each.With the 5870 essentially being 2xRV790 on one chip, in order to accomplish the same frame rates on the same sized 1GB frame buffer, you would expect to need additional bandwidth to facilitate the transfers to and from the frame buffer and GPU.
chizow - Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - link
Ya he mentions bandwidth being a potential issue preventing the 5870 from mirroring the 4870X2's results.It could also be that the 5870's scheduler/dispatch processor aren't as efficient at extracting performance as driver forced AFR. Seems pretty incredible, seeing as physically doubling GPU transistors on a single die has always been traditionally better than multi-GPU scaling.
Similarly, it could be a CPU limitation where CF/SLI benefit more from multi-threaded driver performance, whereas a single GPU would be limited to a single fast thread or core's performance. We saw this a bit as well last year with the GT200s compared to G92s in SLI.