![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Tuesday , September 22, 2009
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5870 Video Card Review
AMD’s ATI Radeon HD 5800 series debuts today and the new ATI Radeon HD 5870 is now available. We will give you all the gritty details of the HD 5800 Series, and show you just how well the new flagship ATI Radeon HD 5870 accelerates games. Can you say, “I like twice as much performance in the same power envelope.”
Need for Speed: Shift
Need for Speed: Shift is the next title in the Need for Speed franchise. This new edition completely changes gameplay compared to everything before it. The new NFS: Shift is a DX9 game, but employs the latest DX9 graphical features such as HDR, depth of field, motion blur, high quality shadows, multisample AA on alpha textures and crisp high quality textures. For our manual run-through we will drive on the Nordschleife track, which is 12+ miles long and lasts 10 minutes. We have enabled 15 opponents to really burden the system, and the time of day set is "Midday."
Highest Playable Settings
Need for Speed: Shift plays quite brilliantly on the Radeon HD 5870. We were able to play with the highest in-game settings on all three video cards at 2560x1600, but the Radeon HD 5870 dominated in antialiasing quality settings. We were able to play with 12X CFAA enabled. CFAA utilizes the streaming processors, so it does take away from shader performance, but there are enough of those available for this game that we could utilize that extra performance and enable CFAA at 2560x1600 without penalty. At 1920x1200 we were able to maximize the CFAA setting at 24X CFAA at 1920x1200.
We also tested Supersampling AA performance in NFS: Shift on the Radeon HD 5870. We found that 2X Supersample AA is playable at 2560x1600. This shows that Supersample does take a large performance hit over Multisample AA or CFAA, but the HD 5870 is still powerful enough to use it at 2560x1600. Moving down to 1920x1200 allowed us to enable 4X Supersample AA.
The Radeon HD 4890 performed rather poorly in this game, we were not able to have any AA enabled at all at 2560x1600. Even with No AA the HD 4890 resulted in the lowest framerates. Therefore, this really shows how much faster the Radeon HD 5870 is if we are able to go from No AA to 12X CFAA at 2560x1600.
The GeForce GTX 285 did remarkably well in this game, allowing us to play at 2560x1600 at 8X CSAA. Remember, CSAA is NVIDIA’s unique AA method that reduces memory usage, but is still overall less quality than 8xQ MSAA. We tried 8xQ MSAA at 2560x1600 and found performance to be very slow.
We did experience what we would think to be unusually high performance out of the GTX 285 compared to the Radeon HD 5870. There might be a reason for this. AMD provided this tidbit of information regarding NFS: Shift.
Need for Speed: Shift
In another TWIMTBP title, we submitted a list of issues that we discovered during the games’ development. These issues include inefficiencies in how the game engine worked with our hardware in addition to real bugs, etc.. We have sent this list to the developer for review.
Unfortunately you will be unable to get a fair assessment of our hardware’s performance on this software until the developer releases a patch to address and fix our reported issues.
So, it is possible that a game patch and or new drivers will provide even greater performance out of the HD 5870 in this game. As it stands right now though, it still is the fastest card for this game and allows an impressive 12X CFAA at 2560x1600.
Apples to Apples
In our apples-to-apples testing we set all video cards to 2560x1600 with 4X AA and highest in-game settings.
As you can see the Radeon HD 5870 is the fastest card here, and is a huge improvement over the Radeon HD 4890. The GTX 285 is creeping up to it, but this may change when a patch/driver is released.