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Introduction and SpecificationsIntroduction
In the world of [size=1em]graphics cards, dual-GPU designs have now become the norm. While we used to view the idea of a dual-GPU graphics card as exotic we now assume with every GPU release that there will and should be a dual-GPU solution to offer top single card graphics performance. With the release of the HD 4800-series of GPUs AMD took the idea even more mainstream by declaring from the outset that the mentality of the design team was to create a part based almost solely on performance per watt efficiency and then use the advantages of CrossFire and multi-GPU technology to build their high-end, enthusiast class card. The Radeon HD 4870 and the HD 4870 X2 were the first tandem to follow this trend but we are now ready to reveal the second.
The Radeon HD 5970 takes a different direction with the naming scheme (no more “X2” here) but follows nearly the identical path in terms of GPU integration.
For those of you looking for a video review, please check out ours directly below. I would love to get some feedback from everyone on what they like or don't like in our videos - [email=rshrout@pcper.com?Subject=5970-review-comments]please drop me a line[/email]!
Radeon HD 5970 Technical Specifications
The Radeon HD 5970 graphics card is simple to explain: it takes a pair of Evergreen GPUs and joins them together with a PLX PCI Express bridge to enable full-time CrossFire on a single high performance graphics card.
With these two high performance chips on a single PCB AMD has created an absolute beast in terms of raw computing power. The card holds 3200 stream processors and provides almost 5 TFLOPs of processing in a single PCIe x16 slot.
The default clock rates of the HD 5970 are 725 MHz core and 1.0 GHz [size=1em]memory – a little closer to the speeds of the single GPU Radeon HD 5850 rather than the Radeon HD 5870. Each GPU has access to a 1GB frame buffer bringing the card total to 2.0 GB. The power consumption of the HD 5970 is also pretty good, especially the idle rating of 42 watts! The peak power consumption of about 300 watts puts it at the maximum limit for a 6-pin and 8-pin power connection pair though there MIGHT be some overclocking to discuss in a bit...
The [size=1em]Radeon HD 5970 [size=1em]Graphics CardAs with previous dual-GPU graphics cards, the Radeon HD 5970 is a bit larger and hotter than its single-GPU cousins.
In this image the card is somewhat unassuming but try to keep in mind how long a typical x16 PCIe slot is and you should realize just how long the card design worked out. The card looks pretty much exactly like the other offerings of the Radeon HD 5000-series (well, at least the 5770 and above) though the cooler design on it is a step above the other cards due to the massive amounts of heat that it needs to disperse.
On the back you can see the retention brackets for the pair of Evergreen GPUs through an opening on the back plate of the card.
One thing of note is that unlike the HD 5870, the HD 5970 uses the entire “column” of the rear panel of the card for exhaust – if you didn’t remember the HD 5800-series of cards were dual-slot but only one half of one of the slots had vents on it. Again, because the heat on this card is higher, AMD’s engineers needed to give the exhaust a better opening.
That unfortunately means that the connectors on the card are more limited; the HD 5970 includes a pair of dual-link DVI connections and a single mini-DisplayPort connection for a third monitor. The HD 5800 cards include two DVI connections but a full size DisplayPort and HDMI connection as well. This new change means that even more users that already had/have a third monitor with DisplayPort connectivity will need ANOTHER new adaptor – this time a miniDP-to-DP passive device. In my searches, finding this anywhere locally proved to be a fruitless effort – checking out someplace like Monoprice.com is likely your best bet.
The Radeon HD 5970 can/will support CrossFireX configurations including a second HD 5970 or adding in any other HD 5800-series of graphics card. Because the HD 5970 already has a pair of GPUs on-board only a single CrossFire connection is required.
From a power perspective the HD 5970 is hungry and it requires an 8-pin and 6-pin connection from the [size=1em]power supply. With a power rating of 300 watts you will want to make sure you have a healthy and reliable [size=1em]power supply – even more so if you choose to go the route of [size=1em]overclocking that we will discuss later.
For a size comparison I have included the above photo: the HD 5970 is on the bottom, a [size=1em]GeForce GTX 285 on top and the HD 5870 sandwiched in between. Obviously with this additional length users will want to be aware of where this card is going, what case it is being squeezed into and what is directly behind the GPU. It may require you to move some of your other [size=1em]components around in the chassis (like hard drives for example) in order for a card of this size to reside in your PC.
One design, two options ([size=1em]overclocking the HD 5970)During our briefing on the new Radeon HD 5970 an interesting fact came out – AMD had initially planned on releasing two dual-GPU cards this winter. One of them was going to be running at the same speeds and performance that exist by default on the HD 5970 that we are looking at today and the other was going to be a highly [size=1em]overclocked version with a more finely tuned PCB, binned GPUs and better memory.
The problem with this plan was two-fold: the “stock” Hemlock card needed to fit inside a 300 watt envelope to meet many of the requirements of the OEMs and other AMD customers and board partners were hesitant to start building and carrying a pair of $550+ graphics cards in this economy. The solution that AMD came up with will potentially be a boon for enthusiast gamers everywhere: they mashed the two ideas together.
Essentially AMD took the board they had designed for the high-end dual-GPU offering and lowered the clocks to meet the <300 watts requirement needed by many OEMs and consumer power supplies. But with the binned GPUs, higher speed memory and improved cooling solution AMD has provided a design with a LOT of overclocking headroom! Even just looking at one spec, the memory modules, shows the picture: though the memory is running at 1.0 GHz it is rated at 1.2 GHz.
The cooler that AMD has included on the Radeon HD 5970 is actually a vapor chamber design that is rated at 400 watts providing a 33% gap between the rated TDP at stock clocks and where you can safely push your card. Obviously AMD was serious about getting some great performance out of this design for those consumers willing to s** out the $600 or so for one.
In order to take advantage of this overclocking headroom, it required two pieces of software: the well known Overdrive utility included in the Catalyst Control Center and a new press-only tool called the “Overvolt utility”. (I say “press only” because AMD is not likely to release it with the driver but will instead have the card vendors include it or a version of it instead.)
The Overvolt utility does exactly what you think it does – it increases the voltages going to the GPU and to the memory on the HD 5970. The software is incredibly basic – a slider bar with only two positions – and is essentially an on/off switch.
After setting the voltages to the higher options the overclocking ability of the GPUs are increased tremendously. AMD says that getting 850 MHz core clock and 1200 MHz memory clock is pretty standard and in fact I was able to go higher than that with very little effort. I ALMOST had [size=1em]900 MHz clock rates 100% stable but backed off to 875 MHz after a random crash or two over the course of a couple of days. As for the memory, getting that to 1250 MHz was not a problem at all. Keep in mind that both of the GPUs on the HD 5970 need to be overclocked independently – there is still no way to overclock both with a single slider (note to AMD!!).
For the Radeon HD 5970 AMD has made a conscious decision to remove most of the limits of the Overdrive software and provide as much potential software headroom for overclocking as possible. I am personally excited to see where water and other unique cooling solutions will be able to take this card!
And there we have it – an overclocked Radeon HD 5970 that was running at a 20% higher clock rate than default speeds by moving a few sliders! Performance was also impressive as you’ll see on the coming pages.
After figuring out that we needed a separate voltage tweaking tool to get the magic to work, I was incredibly impressed by how much and easy the overclocking on the HD 5970 went. Getting 20% more out of your CPU might seem common today but that is not usually the case with graphics cards – NVIDIA and AMD will typically want to get as much performance out of their GPUs as possible in order to compete in market. However, with AMD firmly in the lead in terms of high-end GPUs today, the consumer is getting a great overclocking part as a result of AMD not really needing to be much faster than stock speeds to impress the gaming public.
I do have some issues with the overclocking process that I hope AMD and its partners address very soon. And while I know that this was considered a “press only” preview of the tool, this is all I know of how it will be presented to the consumer when the cards go on sale this week, so I felt it was worth nothing. First, the overvolt utility does not permanently apply the voltage changes and in fact resets every time you reboot. The Overdrive clock settings however do NOT reset meaning that when you reboot you are basically running at the overclocked speed at standard voltages – a scenario that resulted in crashes even during resolution changes until we figured it out.
Keep reading into our performance results to see how the overclocked settings on the Radeon HD 5970 compared to the stock performance as well as the GeForce GTX 295 from NVIDIA.
Eyefinity Considerations, Performance and System SetupIf you follow our [size=1em]graphics articles or video reviews at all, you know that I like the direction AMD is taking with its Eyefinity multi-monitor gaming technology. I have spent quite a bit of time on the technology including in our initial HD 5870 review as well as a separate Eyefinity performance and configuration article earlier in the year. If you haven’t seen this awesome feature at work you definitely need to look at both of these articles to get the full experience.
But I always had a problem with Eyefinity – it didn’t run when multiple GPUs were used in CrossFire configurations. And considering that running at resolutions as high as 7680x1600 is a PERFECT place for the performance advantages of multi-GPU gaming, that is a shame. I said in my HD 5870 and Eyefinity articles that we would not be seeing the dual-GPU version of the Evergreen architecture until they had Eyefinity working in a multi-GPU platform because trying to sell a 5000-series card without the feature now would be political suicide.
Well AMD obviously knew this and is providing provisional Eyefinity support with the HD 5970 graphics card at its release. Why provisional? Because the list of games that are supported compared to single graphics chip options is much much smaller and CrossFire + Eyefinity support is limited to the HD 5970 ONLY. That means that users looking to add a second HD 5800-series card are still going to be out luck for at least another driver revision or two.
Games that AMD lists as supported as of this writing are: Batman, BattleForge, Call of Duty 4 (but now MW2 as of this writing), Call of Duty: World at War, Call of Juarez, Crysis/Warhead, Dawn of War 2, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Far Cry 2, [size=1em]Left 4 Dead, NFS: Shift, GRID, Stalker, HAWX, UT3 and Wow. So while yes, that is a healthy list of games, it falls well short of where it needs to be – and AMD knows this.
One hopefully short term limitation is that for now, only landscape orientations of Eyefinity are supported. While portrait display configurations will work they will not benefit from any performance advantages of the second GPU on the HD 5970.
Another note worth making regarding Eyefinity and the new Radeon HD 5970 graphics card is the connector changes from the 5800-series of cards. As I noted in my video review and on the previous pages of this article, the inclusion of the mini-DisplayPort rather than standard DisplayPort connection means that everyone will need yet another adapter. It would be nice to see the AMD card partners include at the least this adapter in the box with the card – it is passive at least and should be a minimal cost compared to the active DisplayPort-to-DVI adapters required for users without any DisplayPort monitors.
Finally, I wanted to showcase a new utility I was pointed to by our good friend Colleen that will help any of you with Eyefinity setups get it working on specific titles. The big reason this is coming up now: out of the box support for Modern Warfare 2 is HORRIBLE but this very simple, free utility will get it working for you right away.
If you have (or want) and Eyefinity configuration this free tool is definitely worth a download to see if it covers the games you want to play. Below I have included my video showing the Eyefinity experience on Modern Warfare 2 (though dual-GPU acceleration is not working yet) with the Widescreen Fixer application – I think you’ll be impressed.
I did run some very quick Eyefinity performance tests on a few games: Batman, HAWX and Far Cry 2 to see how the new Radeon HD 5970 scales compared to the single GPU HD 5870 card. Here are the results:
The performance gains going from the HD 5870 to the HD 5970 in our 7680x1600 testing range from 30% up to 40% depending on the gaming title. I think one of the limits we are seeing in these tests is that a 1GB framebuffer is just not enough to hold 7680x1600 resolution images, textures, handle AA, etc and thus we might actually see a bigger boost with a 2GB buffer instead. I am sure a vendor is working on it, but how long we will have to wait before getting our hands on such an option is up the air. I predict before CES we will see just that.
The testing configuration for our Radeon HD 5970 review remains unchanged from our recent graphics cards articles. We are comparing the HD 5970 to the Radeon HD 5870 to see how it compares to the top end card from AMD, the GTX 295 from [size=1em]NVIDIA as well as a pair of AMD Radeon HD 5850s in CrossFire mode (since these are closest in default clock speeds). Our second set of tests will compare the HD 5970 in both stock and [size=1em]overclocked settings (875 MHz / 1250 MHz) as well as a pair of Radeon HD 5870 cards in CrossFire mode to see how the dual-GPU beast compares running at nearly 400 watts!
Testing Configuration - ASUS P6T6 WS Revolution X58 + nForce 200
- Intel Core i7-965 @ 3.33 GHz
- 3 x 2GB Corsair DDR3-1333 MHz
- Intel X25-M G2 160GB SSD
Batman: Arkham Asylum
One of the best received gaming titles on both console and PC for 2009, Batman: Arkham Asylum is an impressive game both visually and in terms of design.
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Batman: Arkham Asylum Test Settings
One interesting note: Batman (personally) doesn't allow setting AA levels in-game for AMD graphics card but DOES for NVIDIA GPUs. We instead enabled AA in the AMD Catalyst Control Panel where noted.
It’s close but the new Radeon HD 5970 is able to ouster the GTX 295 graphics card in terms of single card performance – and it obviously beats out the single HD 5870 card in our comparisons. As expected, the performance of the HD 5970 and the pair of HD 5850s are right about on par.
In our [size=1em]overclocked performance testing the HD 5970 impressed us even more as it was able to run 19% faster than the regularly clocked card.
Far Cry 2
Far Cry 2 is the spiritual sequel to one of the best selling and longest living games on the PC though this title was developed not by Crytek, but by Ubisoft directly using a completely new engine as well. The game is set in Africa and you have malaria - what else do you need to know?
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Far Cry 2 settings
Far Cry [size=1em]2 includes a great benchmarking utility that allows us to setup for in-game testing of all varieties and includes both the ability to benchmark based on time (variable frame count) or based on speed (fixed frame count) - we went with the time-based option to simulate real-world gaming and allowing for apples-to-apples comparisons.
The HD 5970 easily becomes the fastest single [size=1em]graphics card for Far Cry 2 as you can see here as it comes in more than 30% faster than the GTX 295. The overclocked version of the HD 5970 gains even more ground by improving on performance by another 15% or so. |
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发表于 2009-11-18 13:53
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