Awesome, awesome post. I've been reading this thread up to this point, and I just have to throw my hat into the ring on this one. I found this thread by googling '5850 and 5870 at same clocks', because I own both cards (two 5850's, in fact) and wanted to see if others were seeing what I am seeing with the performance of them (i.e. they are very close when at the same clocks).
When it's clocked same bandwidth is becoming a factor when you do things like AA and high resolutions. The fact that that 5850 with 160SP less and 8 less TMU is very close to 5870 at same clocks is proof itself.
Daedalus is dead-on right with this post, in terms of what I've been thinking about your *opinions* AzN.
What you are doing *continually* in this thread is erroneous from the standpoint of the scientific method.
You cannot rightfully determine 'a reason' why the 4870x2 is faster than the 5870. It's IMPOSSIBLE to do so, because they are two different cards, and I don't care WHAT you say, they have a TON of differences. Just because you *think* that the only important difference lies in memory bandwidth (which, as has been pointed out to you repeatedly, is not actually true), you DO NOT KNOW THAT. You are GUESSING. Period.
Sure I can determine how the card will perform. I've determined how the 5870 would perform even before it was released when the specs were leaked. How? It's the numbers that dictate computer performance. Not Scientific method. They aren't 2 different as you think it is. They are based on the same architecture with minor improvements. Look it up. It's not that hard to find what ATI have done to 5870 over 4870. I'm not guessing. I've done extensive testing between fillrate and bandwidth and SP. How these units relate to games.
You are violating so many fundamental scientific premises with your entire line of reasoning on this thread, I just felt compelled to chime in. In comparing the 4870x2 with the 5870, you are changing WAY MORE VARIABLES than just the memory bandwidth. Therefore, you CANNOT positively conclude that bandwidth accounts for the difference. Even if it were to 'turn out' that you are actually 'correct', you are still WRONG to claim that you are.
What scientific premises are you talking about? If you are going to mention scientific methods of testing at least come up with evidence showing this. Not just words out of your mouth that doesn't mean squat. The fact that 4870x2 with lower fillrate and SP is beating 5870 with better SP and more tweaks is just that! Bandwidth!!
What is going here with regards to the 5850 vs 5870 issue, to me, seems very simple. This is the exact same phenomenon that one can see when comparing the GTX260 192 vs the GTX275 (at 240sp).
If you were to put these cards at the same clocks (they have 100% identical architectures other than SP's), you would find that the 275 would *only* beat the 260 192sp by 25% (based on the extra shaders it has (240-192/192) = 25%) if you specially devised a test where the shaders were the 100% limiting factor to performance.
Correct.
Much like your pixel fillrate test you continually post here AzN ... it's a test DESIGNED to show a SPECIFIC type of bottleneck.
Quite simply bandwidth and theoretical pixel fill.
Out there in the real world, however, testing games and whatnot, you'd quickly discover that DIFFERENT TESTS (indeed even within the same test, it varies from frame to frame sometimes) can cause bottlenecks in DIFFERENT subsystems of the card!
It's one or the other.
In the real world, you'd likely discover that your 25% shader count advantage would actually give you somewhere between 5% and 22% improvement in frames, and probably the average would be around 10% improvement (off the top of my head).
Is this scientific? What is so different about how you come up your numbers as I come with mine?
And that is because, obviously, shader count is only PART of the card. There's many other links in the chain (tmus, rops, threading engine, compression and AA/AF algorithms, caching bandwidth, memory bandwidth etc), all of which are equally capable of acting as bottlenecks, depending on the demands being made on the card at the time.
Correct. You make a valid point but your idea can be applied into 4870x2 vs 5870. 4870x2 has lower fillrate, less texture fillrate, weaker SP, less cache, same everything else except for BANDWIDTH!
As far as I'm concerned AzN, you've proven nothing with what you've posted on this thread. So, here's another voice adding to the chorus ... I agree with 'everyone else'. You are exercising 'confirmation bias' in an extreme way, picking and choosing data points that seem to bear out (mostly tangentially, at best) what you have decided you already believe.
I suppose these guys pointing drivers is scientific. :/ Seriously you came here to agree and that is all. Even your post only strengthen what I've said. You just don't want to believe it. That's all..
And no matter what, anytime on declares that a certain subsystem on a card is 'the bottleneck' on that card ... they are wrong. Because which part acts as the bottleneck depends on the test you run in order to look for that bottleneck.
Let me remind you again. 4870x2 has weaker core and less of everything except for bandwidth. You implying architectural differences sure. cache and more numbers added on to the RV770 of the same architecture except for bandwidth.
And lastly, RAID 1 does serve as a reasonably accurate analogy with how the memory subsystem of xfire works. Just as nobody in their right mind would claim that you double the bandwidth when you hook up two drives in RAID 1, one should also not claim that running xfire doubles your memory bandwidth. And this because you will get the SAME (or worse) write performance, it's only on reads that you theoretically could get up to a 100% performance increase.
I suppose all this review sites are guilty for putting up double the bandwidth numbers with Xfire or SLI reviews. You might want to email and stop their bolics. :?