News - Sapphire to thwart NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 470 with 2GB HD 5850 TOXIC

[cordas]

hmmm personally the prime issue for me in buying a new GPU is price.... I work out how much I can afford and then look to see which manufacturer/card gives me the best performance within in my price bracket.

[borandi]

2GB easy to fill... GPU simulation

[shaffaaf27]

at 2560 maxed out im sure some games need more than 1gb, ie gta?

would there gpus used in this be cherry pickeed?

[Jimbo75]

True, but by the time you've got sufficient screens via eyefinity to max out the frame buffer, I refuse to believe a 5850 could run it quickly enough to be usable.

You'd be surprised. I run eyefinity 3x1680x1050 on a single overclocked 5770. Games like Dragon age run 30fps+ on max settings except 4xAA instead of 8xAA.

Dirt 2 runs great as well, yes 3 screens even dx11. Age of Conan on medium settings, high view distances.

Somebody needs to do a proper review of Eyefinity showing how good it is at the affordable end of the spectrum.

[jim]

So you're maxing out the frame buffer with those games?

[Jimbo75]

It must be getting pretty close, this is a 5770 after all.

What I really meant was, you'd probably be surprised at how well a 5850 could run even 6 screens, and at that stage running out of memory would be the #1 issue.

It's not only for screens, it's also for AA. I don't know how much attention you've been paying but many of the preview fermi benchmarks where it's beating the 5870 it's doing it at 2560x1600, 8xAA - and the 5870 is running out of memory in games like HAWX at those settings.

[jim]

Yeah, maybe. It just always seems to be the case with high-memory cards - you've got to produce a very exacting set of criteria in order to see any sort of tangible benefit.

In fact when nVidia brought out the 8800 GTS 320/640 I remember that in some of the benchmarks the 320 was the one that won on certain occasions.

[Jimbo75]

Well thing is, some leaked benchmarks show the gtx470 beating the 5870 at maximum resolution, maximum AA because the 5870 ran out of memory. The 5870 was of course superior at maximum resolution, 4xAA, but its performance crashed due to running out of memory with that little bit extra.

That's the difference that even 280mb of extra memory can make, and running out of framebuffer will cause an fps crash in those circumstances. ATI basically had no alternative but to release a 2gb card because of that.