HD 5870 DX 11 Performance and Antialiasing Scaling
ATI Radeon HD 5870 Single, Crossfire and TriFire
Page 1 / 5 12/23/09
Introduction and Test Setup
We recently did an article on Ati Radeon 5870 scaling analysis. Back when the first article was published, some of the currently available DX 11 titles were not released which gave rise to the need of doing a second article to include DX 11 testing. I also mentioned at the end of the original article how the 5870 multi gpu set up is an overkill for pretty much everything (excluding Crysis!) unless you are running at 2560 X 1600 and at AA levels beyond 4 X AA. The original article did not include any testing at higher than 4 X MSAA. This article will include some 8 X MSAA and 12 X CFAA testing. 12 X CFAA was applied by setting the AA filtering to "edge detect" from the Catalyst Control Center and setting 4 X MSAA from the ingame menu.
The following setup was utilized for the benchmarks:
I7 920 @ 4.25 GHZ
3 X 2 GB Patriot Viper 1620 MHZ 8-8-8-24
EVGA X58 Motherboard
3 X HIS Sapphire ATI Radeon 5870 (Catalyst 9.12)
2 X 150 GB 10,000 RPM Velociraptors (RAID 0)
Gateway XHD 30" LCD
BFG 1000 Watt PSU
Image Quality Comparison
I thought it would make sense to give the readers a visual comparison of the various AA levels tested. One can appreciate the significance of these benchmarks a lot more if the different image quality settings are examined. The readers can decide if, for example going from 4 X MSAA to 8 X MSAA is worth the FPS hit they are getting. Granted , screenshots do not do justice to how a game looks in real time, but they are enough for comparative purposed and to make a sound judgement.The screenshots below are from Codemaster's latest DX 11 racing title, Dirt 2. Keep in mind, that these images are crops from the original 2560 X 1600 screenshots.
O X MSAA 2 X MSAA 4 X MSAA
8 X MSAA 12 X CFAA
You would want to click the images and see them in their full resolution (Hover your mouse on the image to get the "next" and "back" icons). Look around the edges of objects and notice how they get progressively smoother as higher levels of antialiasing are applied. A good example would be the car's vipers. The difference between no AA and 2 X AA is quite drastic. Without any AA, Ugly looking jaggies are all over the place but 2 X AA brings some sharpness to the scene. Going from 2 X AA to 4 X AA also shows significant visual improvement. Cranking it up to 8 X AA is still noticeable but beyond that…I am not too sure. If you look long and hard you might be able to notice how the circular edge of the wheel cap looks sharper, but really, you would have to have a phenomenal eye to detect such minute differences in image quality in real time.
Let us move on to some results now.....
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