Weathering all expectations was the realization of a meager 40% gain over the 4890, a number that's since ballooned to about 58% average under a more modern selection of games and drivers. Clearly a card that was more a victim of the times than anything else; a ceiling imposed by the limited demands of contemporary software.
But my new build was going on nine months old then, and a single component short of a complete overhaul from my previous system. I held off buying the graphics card specifically for when one came around that could run Crysis maxed out at 1080p. The thought arose many times over whether I should just spring for a GTX 295, a proven card within my criteria. Instead I decided a single-GPU solution would be best, free of the issues with SLI or Crossfire that depended on game profiles, or sometimes led to microstuttering. Although the 5870 technically fulfilled my needs, it did so only barely, without the headroom for added comfort of gameplay and peace of mind going into future games. By the time the GTX 480 debuted, I knew my alternatives were few.
The advantage of the 5870 and the Cypress core in general is not the architectural design, but the performance per watt and per square millimeter of the chip. While a GTX 480 can make do with similar performance using only 480 SPs, a 1600 SPs 5870 can make do with a die 63% of the size, and 72% of the power. The difference is that while a GTX 480 must obtain its amazing utilization through the use of an extremely complex hardware scheduler, the 5870 frees what transistors it would have used for that task in favor of a predominately software scheduling system. And certainly if AMD concerned themselves with having performance flexible enough to address more compute-centric demands, they could have easily thrown in an extra billion transistors or so, but they had some very specific goals in mind: make a chip in the same power envelope as its predecessor, and get it out in time for Windows 7 and the fall/holiday season. What you get is a barebones gaming solution, nothing extra. Conversely, NVIDIA shot for the moon, and ended up hitting an orbiting satellite instead.
So the 5870 was to be it then, even if it isn't terribly interesting. I am buying these things mostly for what they'll do for my games, riiight? When it came time to choose a specific model, I set eyes on this one, and never looked back:
Taking the design strengths of the reference cooler, while slapping a nice big, manly red fan in the middle, it's probably the best looking 5870 available, aside from maybe this one. There seems to be a sudden trend with custom 5870s, all using center fans and new PCBs. In truth I could have saved money going with an uglier card like that of Sapphire's, but hell I'm already overpaying for this thing regardless, and aesthetics notwithstanding, the XFX card also boasts their trademark double lifetime warranty. Really, XFX dropping their NVIDIA exclusivity was probably one of the best things to ever happen to ATI.
It would be the first time in six years that I've used an ATI card personally, and the transition, I knew, would not be an easy one. The biggest point of concern would be the drivers. Although undoubting of their stability and quality, the interface on the other hand wasn't something I anticipated using with much enthusiasm. NVIDIA has their control panel down to an artform. All the options are laid out before you in a column on the left side, and with a couple of clicks you're editing in-depth settings, rarely ever wondering where to find them. The Catalyst Control Panel, however, insists on hiding everything behind drop-down menus and menus obscured behind buttons poorly laid out in an interface whose only design goal seems to have been to be smaller than their competition. To that they've succeeded, what little consolation it provides to the end user.
Upon installing the card in my system, I encountered black borders around software-rendered screens, an egregiously long driver installation process riddled with 'next' screens, punctuated with a Lord of the Rings Online icon spamming my desktop, improperly rendered fade-to-black effects in Windows, and to make the drivers at least functionally comparable to NVIDIA's, I had to supplement them with an installation of ATI Tray Tools.
I then went looking for a way to set automatic profile options for my games. ATT has a tray icon that, upon right-clicking, gives you a somewhat random list of options somewhere within which you'll find things for setting AA, AF, screen resolution, v-sync overriding, driver optimizations, overclocking, and options for the program itself, among many other things. Of course it's a bit difficult to tell which is going to be under "3D" or "Hardware", or which is going to be under "Options" or "Tweaks", but thankfully game profile management sits at the top, labeled "Game Profiles". Under there you'll find "Manage Profiles...", and then there are tabs for setting things like v-sync and triple buffering, and sub-menus for setting things like AA, AF, and variants thereof, and of course the .exe program you want to associate the profile with, and it's all done in a very frustrating and convoluted manner. Again, NVIDIA has most of these things right there in their control panel, easily located.
The added benefit to having a dedicated third-party program to do all this stuff with, however, is that it generally works better. In particular, v-sync actually works when you tell it to, a common problem with NVIDIA. There are some really fine-tuned controls for optimizations too, far beyond what NVIDIA goes into. What you'd want most, texture filtering optimizations, NVIDIA gives you, but with ATI Tray Tools, you get that and a whole lot more. There are some issues though, specifically that AA wants to stay on sometimes even after closing a game.
And yes I played some games. There are a few times in my life I can distinctly remember being blown away by a graphics card, all of which were on my friend's system. They were the 9800 Pro, the 6800GT, and the GTX 295. There was even a time before that when we ran 3DMark2001SE on his system, yielding a framerate just high enough to appreciably animate the trees at the end of the demo, to which I exclaimed "THOSE MOVE?!" The 5870 just wasn't one of those times, and in fact I was quite surprised how easy it was to bring the card to its knees. Playing STALKER Clear Sky completely maxed out, or the Heaven 2.0 benchmark, or the very reason for buying such a card, Crysis at highest settings, all caused it to struggle, and even Borderlands posed a challenge, due to some sort of performance bug with my configuration. It was an underwhelming card on paper, and now, a somewhat underwhelming card in practice. I haven't even bought Metro 2033 or Bad Company 2 yet!
Still there were some bright spots of course. Dawn of Discovery proved a laughable prospect for the card, unflinchingly churning out frames at the highest my monitor could display them, whatever the settings I chose. Coming from a crippled 8800GTS 320MB, this was pretty amazing. STALKER Shadow of Chernobyl with the graphical enhancements of the Complete 2009 mod posed no problem, but then I couldn't use AA. And it was nice to have World of Warcraft with working alpha-sampled texture AA.
When you look past the software inconveniences, the card is a pleasure to use. Image quality is sublime, and performance is adequate to great, but this truly is a barebones gaming solution. There are no extras like CUDA or PhysX, which aren't much on their own, but together add up to be fairly nice bonuses, with potential to become crucial in the future. A CUDA video encoder with x264 support is more than a little tantalizing. In a year's time, I may sell this 5870 and buy a shrunken version of the GF100, but for now, this will hold me over well enough.
