HD 5870 first impressions

[Voxilla]

With some luck I was able to purchase one of the still very rare HD 5870 boards.
Replacing my GTX280 with this new board and installing drivers only took a couple of minutes.

Before I already had downloaded the latest August directx sdk and installed the directx11 beta on my Vista 64 machine, so I was eager to have a look at all the directx11 sdk samples. To my happy surprise all of them worked. The tessellation samples are really impressive. The tessellation pattern in wire frame is quite fascinating to look at when the tessellation changes.

My own non dx11 tessellation algorithm fares quite well too going to 750 million triangles per second up from 420 MTris/s on my old GTX280. So triangle rate is really good with this card. Even my recent quake software renderer sees a boots to 800 Mpix/s, up from 750Mpix/s.

The AMD Froblins demo is quite interesting to be seen too, some impressive use of tessellation and displacement mapping, even if it is only dx10.
I wonder if they have any new demos upcoming.

 

[w0mbat]

Did u try Battleforge@DX11?

 

[Voxilla]

Did u try Battleforge@DX11?

No, if there is some free demo I'm happy to try it

 

[Brad Grenz]

Battleforge is a free to play game from EA. No purchase necessary!

 

[Dave Baumann]

I wonder if they have any new demos upcoming.

I believe that we should be making the DX11 Depth of Field and Order Independant Transparancy demos available. I'm trying to esablish when, if we are (press already have a build of these).

No, if there is some free demo I'm happy to try it

Battleforge is now under a "Play For Free" model. You pay for additionaly units, but the the free game has enough to get you started.

 

[Lightman]

I believe that we should be making the DX11 Depth of Field and Order Independant Transparancy demos available. I'm trying to esablish when, if we are (press already have a build of these).



Battleforge is now under a "Play For Free" model. Do pay for additionaly unitsl, but the the free game has enought to get you started.

Is there anything new involving Ruby in the pipe as well?

 

[IRQ Conflict]

Heh, they never released the old one with Dog in it. That's the one I want to try. Maybe there was a licensing issue with it because the robot looks so much like Dog, Valve might have had a fit?

 

[Kaotik]

My own non dx11 tessellation algorithm fares quite well too going to 750 million triangles per second up from 420 MTris/s on my old GTX280. So triangle rate is really good with this card. Even my recent quake software renderer sees a boots to 800 Mpix/s, up from 750Mpix/s.

¨
How exactly does your GTX280 run your DX11 tesselation algorithm with only 10.0 hardware?

 

[sunscar]

¨
How exactly does your GTX280 run your DX11 tesselation algorithm with only 10.0 hardware?

Re-read and it'll make more sense... He said his own "non DX11 tessellation algorithm" fares quite well... accidents happen.

And I'm sorta with this guy - have we seen any actual tech demos? Not just fifteen second snippets from somebody's iPhone? So far the only one I've managed quality footage of has been the OIT demo.

 

[Kaotik]

Re-read and it'll make more sense... He said his own "non DX11 tessellation algorithm" fares quite well...

And I'm sorta with this guy - have we seen any actual tech demos? Not just fifteen second snippets from somebody's iPhone? So far the only one I've managed quality footage of has been the OIT demo.

indeed, my bad

but, another question regarding it, can your tesselation algorithm take advantage of the hardware tesselator, or is it run on shaders on both cards?

 

[Voxilla]

but, another question regarding it, can your tesselation algorithm take advantage of the hardware tesselator, or is it run on shaders on both cards?

The algorithm does not make use of a hardware tessellation even if it would be present, the current version is DX9. The way it works already ensures that it can run at maximum triangle rate, so I don't think hardware tessellation with displacement mapping would make it faster. I'm working on an updated version, I have it running now in DX10 and thought instanced drawing would make it faster, but currently it only got slower. It should be easy now to make a DX11 version and see if this would be any faster, but as I said I think I'm already saturating the triangle rasterizer.
However for drawing large amounts of small tessellated patches DX11 should be faster as everything can be done on the GPU with the hull shader, where my method requires updating constant buffers for setting patch positions.

 

[pcchen]

I'm also interested in getting one, since currently my 4850 can't run compute shader, so I can only test my programs on my GTX 285 (and other G92 cards). But right now the only cards I can find here cost about US$440 (cards from both ASUS and MSI cost about the same).

 

[argor]

ati is sertiling steping up the game I was watching the ccp keynote today and they ccp showed of a version of Eve Online special optimist for triple monitors and did say that ati had cards out that supports triple monitors :smile:

 

[CNCAddict]

Hmm, I really really miss the old style demos like Animusic and Toy Shop. It's nice to have plain simple "tech" demos, but when it's included in a unique/different environment with a sound theme is just seems to add so much. Anyway...here's to wishing

 

[Kaotik]

Hmm, I really really miss the old style demos like Animusic and Toy Shop. It's nice to have plain simple "tech" demos, but when it's included in a unique/different environment with a sound theme is just seems to add so much. Anyway...here's to wishing

Toy shop is trule the most amazing demo so far, ever. Only thing coming even close was seeing Unreal intro with Voodoo back in the good old days

 

[swaaye]

I was fascinated by the NVIDIA demo "Dagoth Moor Zoological Gardens" back in the NV10 days. It was sorta Morrowind graphics 3 years before Morrowind. And it had just wacky weird stuff. You could wander around and explore.


http://www.nvnews.net/reviews/geforce_256/experience.shtmlhttp://www.thefreewareforum.com/index.php?showtopic=28

 

[Voxilla]

Toy shop is trule the most amazing demo so far, ever. Only thing coming even close was seeing Unreal intro with Voodoo back in the good old days

Yes, this one combines great technical effects with beautiful artwork. With resolution cranked up to 2560x1600 it runs smooth as butter at 60 fps, on the 5870.
The Froblins demo with it's path finding is quite funny to watch and interact with. Technically it is very advanced, tough runs only at 20 fps at 2560x1600.

 

[Mendel]

So how is the fan noise?

I have doubts about upgrading from 4870 because according to reviews I've read, it's like 10dB more noisy with 5870...

 

[Voxilla]

So how is the fan noise?

I have doubts about upgrading from 4870 because according to reviews I've read, it's like 10dB more noisy with 5870...

For me the fan is silent enough, with normal rendering loads it does not go more than 30% full throttle and than it is barely audible.
With FurMark in Xtreme Burning Mode GPU temperature goes up to 86 degrees Celsius, and the fan goes to 40% and than it gets fairly noticeable...

 

[thatdude90210]

Yeah, at idle it's barely noticeable. I have to open the case and stop the fans to notice something, only a tone difference.

The big difference is in the amount of hot air that come out. At idle, my 4870 used to push out a good amount of fairly hot air. Think of the electricity used to generate all that hot air. The air coming out of the 5870 isn't even warm. Even putting my fingers to the back of the Gpu, I can barely feel any warmth. Is this thing on?