HD Radeon 5870 2GB Tri Fire ReviewPerformance comparison between 1GB and 2GB models
Page 1 / 12 10/18/10
Introduction and Test Setup
At this point in time, an article that compares the performance of six 5 series ATI cards might be considered a waste of time, money and energy. 6 series cards are on the verge of release and people who intended to buy a 5XXX Radeon have already done so. And if they haven't, there is plenty of information already available on the internet for them to make a sound judgment about their hardware purchase. What is the purpose of this article then? Today we will look at a certain aspect of high end GPUs which is either not touched in the mainstream media at all, or if it is, it is mostly misrepresented due to the testing methods applied. We will look at the benefits that a current high end GPU equipped with 2GB of video RAM has to offer over its 1GB counterpart, when tested at extreme image quality settings in Single card, CrossfireX and Trifire modes.
This is not the first time Benchmarkextreme is performing this sort of an analysis. One of our recent articles compared the three different models of GTX 460 in single and dual SLI modes. We did see some noticeable differences when moving from 768 MB version to 1 GB version, but beyond that the differences were just enough to be recorded. The GTX 460 is an amazing card, but form both a price and performance stand point, it is not in the same league as a 5870. Moreover, Tri SLI is not supported with GTX 460. This is why for the original review we had to limit ourselves to reasonable image quality settings in most benchmarks. This meant that AA was turned off in METRO 2033 and Crysis and was kept to 4XAA in various other titles (at 2560 X 1600).
Today's test cards however are much more powerful. When you are running three 5870s with each having 2GB GDDR5 video memory, it would be foolish to test at anything but the highest settings. I have seen many reviews where the potential benefits of having the extra RAM are dismissed after testing at moderate image quality settings on a single card. But what about multiple cards? And what about extreme image quality settings? This is exactly what we will find out today.
The following setup was utilized for the benchmarks:
I7 920 @ 4.30 GHZ
3 X 2 GB Patriot Viper 1620 MHZ 7-8-8-20
EVGA X58 Motherboard
3 X Gigabyte ATI Radeon 5870 1GB GDDR5 (Catalyst 10.9)
3 X Sapphire ATI Radeon 5870 2GB GDDR5 (Catalyst 10.9)
150 GB 10,000 RPM Velociraptor
Dell 3008wfp 30" LCD
Antec 1200 Watt PSU
Windows 7 64 bit
The 2 GB model that we tested is actually branded the eyefinity6 model. This is because it features 6 mini display ports and supports up to six monitors in eyefinity. However, that will not be our focus for today's review.
Software Used
I used a mix of DX9,DX 10 and DX 11 titles for this article :
3D Mark Vantage DX10
Unigine Heaven DX11
Alien vs Predator DX11 Benchmark
Battleforge DX11
Crysis Warhead DX10
Dirt 2 DX11
Far Cry 2 DX10
HAWX DX10.1
Just Cause 2 DX10
Lost Planet 2 DX9
Mafia 2 DX9
Metro 2033 DX11
Napoleon: Total War DX9
Stalker: COP DX11 Benchmark
Before we move on to the results, there is one more thing that I would like to point out. The purpose of this review is to demonstrate the raw rendering capabilities of two video cards that differ only in the size of their frame buffer. This may or may not take your gaming experience to a level that you may desire (in most cases it actually will but that is not the exact focus of the article). One could argue that an enthusiast might decide to take three or four of these cards and overclock them on water or Liquid Nitrogen. In that sense, it would be more beneficial to look at the raw potential, rather than the relative gaming performance.
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