AMD / ATI Radeon HD5800 -review thread

Anand mentions 14 SIMDs, but not 1120SPs. Even if true, AMD could have reduced simd width as they've done in the past, which would give it 840SPs (simd width 12) or 560SPs (simd width 8, admittedly that doesn't make any sense).

 

Is there any official word that the 5800 series is no longer under filtering with it's AF? Would be nice to see an end or a reduction in texture crawl/sparklies.

Also is there any chance of a driver release before October? The CD drivers seem to be a modded 9.9, which is of course older than the review driver.

 

MSI provides on their site drivers that are newer than those which were made available to the press.

 

I wish there was a review that would investigate scaling with memory overclocking. After seeing the reviews, I have an impression that it might be bandwidth starved.

 

According to AMD, 5800 series has a perfect angle-independent anisotropic filtering. They have a nice picture of it running the famous cylinder test program with perfect result in their marketing material.

Anandtech has a page in their review discussing this matter.

 

I just noticed this in the [H] review.

WTF is this? Why should supersampling degrade texture quality? Maybe they're using some sort of wide tent filter?

Sounds like a driver glitch to me.

 

Because LOD is not adjusted trough driver, like on the old Voodoos.

 

According to the review on Anandtech, it's a driver bug that is visible in Source based games.

 

Would forcing a negative LOD bias help?

According to [H] this happens in Ghostbusters as well.

 

AFAIK LOD wasn't automatically adjusted by the driver on the voodoos and yes manually set a negative LOD would help.

 

Depends on the source of the error. I would assume a driver update is in the pipeline.

 

The issue isn't angle independence, but texture "shimmering." I have a HD4850 and play mostly older games; it seems absurd to me that I can have over 200 FPS (which are of no use) with AA & AF, yet still be looking at a sparkly mess. Annoying.

 

I don't know what game you are having this issue, but many old games deliberately use negative LOD to make textures less blurry before anisotropic filtering was widely supported, or just disable MIP-mapping outright. If this is the cause of your problem, then what you need should be a forced MIP-mapping with no-LOD-biased anisotropic filtering. I'm not sure whether RV870 supports this in its driver though.

 

Try AA 16x (MSAA 8x + wide-tent). Helps a bit... Anyway, HD5800 has super-sampling, which can be used as texture-aliasing killer.

 

http://ht4u.net/reviews/2009/amd_ati_radeon_hd_5870/index7.php

Vids which show the AF quality on 48xx and 58xx and GTX2xx. (you can clearly see the light texture shimmering on the radeons)

Fraps needs to be installed to watch. Each vid ~60mb

On the right side it shows the reference af implementation.

 

8.66 has already been posted as a "Hotfix" specifically for ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series. I'd recomment this is used as it has a number of performance improvements, fixes and this driver also enables Eyefinity.

http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/ATIRadeonHD5800seriesrecommendedgraphicsdriver.aspx

 

Its the same size as the standard HD 5870.

 

Pretty much. "Nothing is for free in 3D". The fansink underneath is a fairly lengthy 4 heatpipe design, which has a pretty high thermal capacity.

I think the keepout zone behind the regulators is where the base of the actual fan goes. Also note there is is a 5'th heatpipe that sits directly over the regulators.

Mmmm, not sure what you mean..?

 

Here are a ton of pics of the 5870 cooler:

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ATI/Radeon_HD_5870/4.html

 

Don't suppose there will be an XP version posted? Yes I know old OS is old, but I won't have my Windows 7 till October