AMD Radeon HD 5970 Dual-GPU Card Sweeps Benchmarks

MojoKid writes "AMD launched yet another high-end graphics card based on their Radeon HD 5800 series technology, and this time it's a dual-GPU variant. Considering the fact that AMD's Radeon HD 5870 is currently the fastest single-GPU powered graphics card currently on the market, the new dual-GPU powered Radeon HD 5970 should offer performance that completely outclasses any other single graphics card on the market right now. The card has 3200 stream processors under the hood, though its graphics engines are built on 40nm manufacturing technology, so power consumption isn't actually too insane. The card does exceptionally well in the usual benchmarks, as expected." HotHardware has begun providing single-page views — a user-friendly decision. PCPer.com also has coverage. And pcpro.co.uk wonders whether, at 13" (33 cm) in length, the new card will even fit in most PC cases.

Don't forget Anandtech

[distantbody]

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3679 [anandtech.com]

The problem is....

[Anonymous Coward]

That it's an ATI card. It has been my experience that AMD/ATI just doesn't support their cards in other operating systems such as Linux as well as NVIDIA. I like to run operating systems other than Windows.

Re:games?

[cayenne8]

Does anyone have much luck getting full performance, or even function at all with these Radeon cards on Linux boxes? I pretty much stick to NVIDIA to this point...are the drivers there and working more now for the AMD cards?

Re:games?

[h4rm0ny]

Are you kidding? Driver support for Radeon is excellent now - better than NVIDIA. And it's continuing to improve. I think there are some older cards that are still badly supported.

Re:games?

[AvitarX]

better, like good hardware accelerated video decoding?

Or are you comparing open source drivers?

I know Nvidia has some suck in its drivers too, but the ATI ones are terrible.

Re:AMD's Idea of "Launch"

[Astatine]

Anecdotally, the situation is not as bad as "4-6 weeks". I have a 5850. I pre-ordered it a couple of days before launch. I got it the following week.

According to the web forum of the retailer I shopped with (overclockers.co.uk) the stock has been trickling in in small shipments. If the shipments are never quite large enough to finish off the retailer's pre-order book, the item may never appear as "in stock" on the website (giving the impression there aren't any around at all), even though people who order are actually getting them reasonably promptly.

Re:I'm not sure why PCpro is whining...

[Coren22]

Very true. I have had to deal with some of these max length cards, it is definitely not a AMD or NVIDIA problem, it is a case manufacturer problem.

Re:Nvidia

[Coren22]

But it supports DX10, and that is the big deal.

Re:The problem is....

[bcmm]

I will agree that open-source drivers for ATI cards are fantastic (and binary drivers are truly terrible). I'm using the new (using release candidates of kernel 2.6.32) r600 hardware acceleration support, and it's already working very well for me (mostly for Google Earth and Kwin desktop effects, both of which work flawlessly and very smoothly).

However, I would caution that support for the chip mentioned in this article (Radeon Evergreen) is marked as "TODO" [x.org]. Presumably, it should progress relatively fast, because AMD is basically being helpful.

Nvidia deserves some credit for updating their binary driver regularly, and making helpful changes very fast when alphas of KDE 4 started showing up performance issues in some previously rarely-used features, but AMD has done rather better by actually providing documentation to freedesktop people (even if ATI never maintained their own binary driver very well at all).

Re:games?

[Cornelius the Great]

ATI drivers used to be BAD. My old Radeon 7500 couldn't even handle glxgears without crashing. ATI drivers have gotten remarkably better since the AMD merger, and my radeon HD4850 handles compiz just as well as my Geforce 8800GTX.

In windows, I'm seeing more stability in games with the ATI card. Anecdotal, yes, but I believe that ATI's drivers have certainly improved on both Windows and Linux and no longer deserve their former reputation.

Vaporware

[mseeger]

For me the news reads: ATI anounces a new, faster graphics card which is as unavailable as the previous one.

Re:Legacy in 2 Years Time?

[mrpacmanjel]

My laptop is an AMD Sempron with ATI "R300M xpress".

The last ATI driver to support the chipset was 9.3 - the current version is 9.10ish(?).

For a good few years I have enjoyed 3d acceleration with 9.3 drivers and xorg 1.4.2 (Slackware 12.2).

However, Slackware 13 contains the latest xorg drivers (1.6) and guess what? the latest xorg is not suppported by 9.3.

I can use the open-source version of the driver but 3d acceleration is pretty poor in comparison.

Even if they fully open-sourced the legacy drivers then this would not be an issue - otherwise I am screwed.

Most current linux distribution use the latest xorg drivers - this means I will have to "downgrade" to older xorg drivers to enjoy "proper" 3d performance.

A workable but painful option for me.

Re:I'm not sure why PCpro is whining...

[NJRoadfan]

I guess the case makers forgot the days of full length VLB and ISA cards. The spec calls for 13.3 inch cards max, most cards are half that length nowadays. Of course this isn't a new problem, Tandy was infamous for building the cases of their 1000 line of computers too short to accept the then-common full length cards.

Re:So run it in Crossfire mode.

[Briareos]

>

I'll check the Diamond site and see if there's a new suite. I really don't go into Crossfire that often as most games don't support it but the ones that do really look great.

It's up to you, but why anyone would look at the card manufacturer's site for recent driver is really beyond me - if you want drivers for the desktop, go to the chipset manufacturer's site...

Almost all of those cards are exact copies of the reference design modulo some fancy cooling solution - there's nothing for the manufacturers to do other than slapping their logo on the driver.