Conclusion

When you take the Cypress based Radeon HD 5870 and cut out 2 SIMDs and 15% of the clock speed to make a Radeon HD 5850, on paper you have a card 23% slower. In practice, that difference is only between 10% and 15% depending on the resolution. What’s not a theory is AMD’s pricing: they may have cut off 15% of the performance to make the 5850, but they have also cut the price by well more than 15%; 31% to be precise.

The result of this is clear: the 5870 is the fastest single-GPU card, and the 5850 is the value alternative. Couple that with the fact that it’s cooler running, quieter, shorter, and less power hungry, and you have a very interesting card. Design-wise the 5850 lets AMD get Cypress in to slightly smaller cases that can’t fit full 10.5” cards, something NVIDIA was never able to capitalize on with the reference GTX design (we actually had several comments on this; apparently a good number of people can’t fit 10.5” cards). The 5870/5850 situation ends up closely mirroring the 4870/4850 situation as a result; the 5870 is still the card to get when price (and size) is no object, but the 5850 is there to fill the gap if you won’t miss some of the performance.

One thing that’s very clear in these benchmarks is that as things currently stand, the 5850 has made the GTX 285 irrelevant (again). The 5850 is anywhere between 9% and 16% faster depending on the resolution, cheaper by at least $35 as of Tuesday morning (with everything besides a single BFG model going for +$70 or more), and features DirectX11. The 5850 is a card that manages to – if at times barely – outclass the GTX285 in performance. If you’ve been waiting for a price shakeup, this is what you’ve been waiting for.

Technically NVIDIA can get away with pricing the GTX285 anywhere under $260, but realistically its price needs to match its performance. With the 5850 having roughly 16% lead over the GTX 285 at 2560x1600, it doesn’t make much sense to pick up a GTX 285 unless prices fall a similar amount. This would be $225, which means lopping off at least $70 from the cheapest GTX285. If buyers believe that there’s any value in DX11, then NVIDIA would need to go even lower to offset that that gap, potentially as low at $200.

Meanwhile the $200-$225 range is the same price range the GTX 275 occupies. Cutting GTX 285 prices means cutting GTX 275 prices, which may require repricing the GTX 260, etc. NVIDIA’s response is going to bear watching if only to gauge what kind of cuts they can afford. Along the same lines we wouldn’t be surprised to see a GTX product retired due to price compression if NVIDIA can’t drop the price on the GTX 260 any further. Meanwhile vendor-overclocked cards will be the wildcard here; vendors can’t hope to completely close the gap, but the smaller performance gap will help them keep higher prices. Already we’re seeing fewer and fewer stock-clocked cards for sale compared to overclocked cards.

Update: We went window shopping again this afternoon to see if there were any GTX 285 price changes. There weren't. In fact GTX 285 supply seems pretty low; MWave, ZipZoomFly, and Newegg only have a few models in stock. We asked NVIDIA about this, but all they had to say was "demand remains strong". Given the timing, we're still suspicious that something may be afoot.

As for AMD, they’re in a much better pricing position. With the 4890 already priced under $200, the 5850 isn’t an immediate threat. If anything, the threat is a cheap GTX285 at the same price, which would outclass the 4890. It’s unlikely that the 5850 would be threatened on pricing, as we don’t expect NVIDIA to cut any more than they have to.

Moving on, we have the multi-GPU situation. While a pair of 5870s is the fastest dual-card setup out there, such a setup also pushes $760. A pair of 5850s won’t be as fast, but they also run for a far more palatable $520. Unfortunately Crossfire scaling just isn’t as good as SLI scaling in the tests we’ve seen; the performance gap varies wildly between games, and only averages 5% across all of them. If NVIDIA lowers the price on the GTX 285 enough, that 5% difference may end up a tossup. The 5850 still has better power performance and DX11, but it’s going to be easy to find the right price for the GTX 285 to nullify that. This is very close to being a draw.

Ultimately AMD is going to be spending at least the next few months in a very comfortable situation. They launched the world’s fastest single-GPU card last week, and they’re launching the world’s second-fastest single-GPU this week. Based on performance alone, from $220 up to the Radeon HD 5870’s price point, the Radeon HD 5850 is going to be the card to get. Meanwhile DirectX 11 is the icing on the cake that offers the 5800 series a greater lifespan and promise of future improvements in games.

For this fall, we're able to say something we haven't been able to say for quite some time: AMD has the high-end market locked up tight.

Power, Temperature, & Noise
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  • Ryan Smith - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link

    An excellent question! This isn't something we had a chance to put in the article, but I'm working on something else for later this week to take a look at exactly that. The 5850 gives us more of an ability to test that, since Overdrive isn't capped as low on a percentage basis.
  • Zool - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link

    You could make some raw shader tests that doesnt depend on memory bandwith to see if the gpu internal bandwith is somehow limited or the external bandwith. And maybe try out some older games(quake3 or 3dmark2001).
    In DX11 games will use more shader power for other things which hawe litle impact on bandwith. Maybe they tested those heawy dx11 scenarios and ended with much less costly 256bit interface as a compromis.
  • Dante80 - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link

    Up to 80watts lower consumption in load
    120$ less
    Quieter
    Cooler
    Shorter
    Performance hit around 10-15% against 5870 (that means far better perf/watt and perf/$)
    ~12% More performance than GT285
    Overclocks to 5870 perf easily

    Ok, this is an absolute killer for the lower performance market segment. Its 4870vs4850 all over again. Only this time, they get the performance crown for single cards too.

    Another thing to remember, is that nvidia does not currently have a countermeasure for this card. The GT380 will be priced for the enthusiast segment, and we can only hope for the architecture to be flexible enough to provide a 360 for the upper performance segment without killing profits due to diesize constraints. Things will get even more messy as soon as Juniper lands, the greens have to act now (thats our interest as consumers too)! And I don't think that GT200 respins will cut it.
  • the zorro - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link

    maybe if intel heavily overclocks a gma 4500 can can compete with amd?
  • haplo602 - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link

    hmm ... my next system shoudl feature a GTS 250. Unless ATI releases a 5670 and finaly hits opengl 3.2 and opencl support in their linux drivers.

    anyway the 5850 will kill lot of Nvidia cards.
  • san1s - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link

    interesting results, can't wait to see how gt300 will compare
  • palladium - Thursday, October 1, 2009 - link

    "interesting results, can't wait to see how gt300 will compare "

    SiliconDoc: WTF?! 5870< GTX295, top end GT300>>295 because it has 384bit GDDR5 ( 5870 only 256 bit), so naturally GT300 will KICK RV8xx's A**!!!!

    That's my prediction anyway (hopefully he decides not to troll here)
  • Dobs - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link

    My guess is - GT300 wont compare to 5850 or 5870.
    It will compare with the 5870X2 and be in the price bracket. (Too much for most of us.)

    When the GT300 eventually gets released that is.... Then a few months later again nvidia will bring out the scaled down versions in the same price brackets as the 5850/5870 that will probably compete pretty well.

    Only question is - can you wait?
    You could wait for the 6870 as well:P

  • Vinas - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link

    No, I don't have to wait because I have a 5870 :-)
  • The0ne - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link

    I really think enthusiast that spends hundreds on the MB alone isn't the regular enthusiast. So price wouldn't be an issue. I love building PCs and testing them but I'm not going to spend $200+ of a MB knowing that I will be building another system in few months with better performance parts and pricing. Unless I'm really keeping the system for a long time then I'll pour my hard earn money into the high end parts. But then if you're doing this I don't think you're really an enthusiast as it's really a one shot deal?

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