News - AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5870 X2 "Hemlock" poses for the camera

[shaithis]

Looks exatly the same size as a 4870x2, same power connectors also.

[Biscuit]

well considering the power requirements of the 5870 is about the same as a 4890 its likely to be similar between 4870x2 and 5870x2.

[eKrAsH]

One must question wether ATI is releasing dysfunctional drivers for prior series of video cards as part of its aggressive marketing strategy to pressure the consumer into purchasing the latest 5800 series. One could say that it follows a trend over time. In my experience the latest Catalyst 9.9 drivers are unstable, stuttering has increased annoyingly, framerates have dropped unacceptably. I rolled back to Catalyst 9.8 which is the only solid stable driver for Quadfire and OC'ing the 4870 X2's in Quadfire. I have the clocks maxed in 9.8 with no ill-effects. Under 9.9 it artifacts in games from the logon screen.

I can't believe AMD would expect the new 5800 series to run under the 9.9 drivers. And that little secret about unlocking the full potential of the 4870 X2 through some form of interconnect or memory pipeline in the controller between the GPU's, that was claimed to unleash a hoard of horsepower? Well, I guess we can all forget about it as it must have been a rumor all along and we won't see it in the 5870 X2 either. So out with the old and in with the new already.


It might help ATI-AMD to have an API standard that could be released to game and software developers as an open source model for scaling Xfire, so that Xfire could actually be utilized. Otherwise I expect one GPU and one video card will get fryed and eventually fail before the other. I don't see and haven't seen any load balancing between GPU's in any application or game, not even in Crysis. Such an API might do for ATI what Nvidia's PhysX engine does for Nvidia but I can't speak to SLI and haven't seen SLI's scalability, which is why AMD needs to get Xfire to scale across multiple GPU's, otherwise Xfire is just a gimmick and I am not experiencing any demonstrable benefit. Another reason why SLI, Xfire, and PhysX should be standardized and available in an open-source development community.

I haven't seen any Xfire performance yet while monitoring GPU activity regardless of how many games or applications are running in the background, they all utilize only one GPU. I have a tough time dealing with quadfire's only advantage of using multiple gpu's and then only being able to run a few extra instances of folding@home, that's about as much Xfire performance as AMD will give you.

Otherwise, these 4870 X2's in quadfire handles every MMO exceptionaly well and Crysis is totally maxed out in enthusiast settings without any hiccups. There are occasional stutters in WOW and a strange slingshot effect probably due to buffers flushing data in and out.