AMD's Radeon HD 5870 Eyefinity 6 Edition Reviewed
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 31, 2010 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
2GB vs. 1GB: Does it Matter?
AMD equipped the Eyefinity Edition cards with 2GB of GDDR5 to deal with the increased memory requirements that come with pushing 2x the pixels of a standard 5870. But does the added memory improve performance in single-monitor scenarios?
We ran through our standard GPU test suite (the same suite from the GTX 480 review) with our Eyefinity 6 Edition card and found that there's no performance advantage to having a 2GB frame buffer at 2560 x 1600 or below.
Performance did improve in our Crysis Warhead benchmark, but only in minimum frame rate. There we saw a 40% improvement in minimum frame rates at 2560 x 1600, but not often enough to really increase the average. The rest of our benchmarks don't produce repeatable enough minimum frame rates for us to draw any meaningful conclusions.
For single monitor users, I'm not sure that the 2GB frame buffer is worth it for today's games.
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cfaalm - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
Why don't AMD go talk to display manufactureres to thin out or even totally forego any bezels on Eyefinity compatible displays? In other dual/multiple screen situations than Eyefinity it can still be desirable to have real thin or no bezels, so it won't be that far out.Aclough - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
They're working on them now, but they aren't out yet. Be warned that they'll probably cost more than normal monitors though.cfaalm - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
I expected they would cost a bit more. Though I don't have any figures on the premium I guess it would be worth it compared to what gains can be had it these special situations where you'd be spending a small fortune anyway.mjrpes3 - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
It's greatly in their interest to develop this technology: lowering the barrier and increasing the incentive to buy 3x or 6x quantity of a product.Calin - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link
Sell more cheap monitors instead of fewer expensive monitors? I don't think so.Calin - Thursday, April 1, 2010 - link
The bezels are there with a purpose (strength, if nothing else).There are monitors with thin bezels - what we might need now could be pre-built monitors in 6x configuration, reducing as much as possible the bezel size (they could do it better in the factory). Maybe some boutique industry could spring from this? Something like the tuning shops in the auto industry
behrouz - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
Hi Anand.this is very beautiful and the logo at top of page is better than previous logo.
good luck.
Manuel1975 - Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - link
Does anybody know if there will be any mac drivers? This would be a formidable beast in combination with MacPro and Mediaserver Software...erple2 - Friday, April 2, 2010 - link
I think that this tech would be wasted on a Media Server implementation. Unless you're talking about something different than what I'm thinking of. Streaming media to these devices would be essentially pointless, as few, if any, media is available at any resolution beyond 1080p.Putting it on a Mac makes even less sense, given that what makes this unique is the ability to run solid 3D games titles. And last I checked, there were few, if any, 3D games available on the Mac Platform.
While Apple does offer multiple graphics cards in their MacPro systems, they're generally very low-end graphics products (currently NVidia GeForce GT 120 based), meant to drive CAD or other non-3D gaming applications. Those can easily handle any Media server load you could throw at it. I suppose you could make the argument that it could upscale the video to 2160p (doubling 1080p), but that seems to be pointless to me - just run a larger 1080p projector.
Manuel1975 - Tuesday, August 3, 2010 - link
Hi Erple,The media I use to drive multiple dipslays normaly reqiure something along the range of 640x480 to a 4k type of resolution. Although these high resolutions are not mainstream, Youtube for instance does alow you to upload videos in 4k resolution. The future of HD+ video is very very near.
And nowadays OSX ships with something called quartz composer. This something you can compare with prosessing. Its OpenGL bases image synthesis. Truely amazing stuf: 4k+ resolutions rendered at 60hz. Eazely.
Tip for your next post: try to think outside your box before posting.