ATI Radeon HD 5850 vs. nVidia GeForce 8800 GTX SLI

[jdwest1]

Lost my old login of years as I haven't posted forever and don't have access to my old email, so here it goes on a new account:

I'm interested in anyone who has been able to test a these two video card setups with all other factors remaining equal. Current game/software/etc. performance numbers at 1920x1200 would be welcome (of course future DX 11 games will make it moot). I'm debating on whether upgrading from the 8800 GTX SLI (OC'd to 600/950 currently) to the 5850 would be meaningful or whether my old SLI build still keeps things close enough to wait for the next cycle. So far I'm still able to play all current games (Dragon Age, Batman, etc.) with basically max or at least HQ settings at 30 FPS or more so I haven't had a need to this point. But of course the FPS continues to drop over time. I'm eager to get rid of the power/heat that these two cards cost too, but only if the performance difference is significant enough.

Here's the basic specs of my box although it should be mostly irrelevant in a video card comparison:

Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 @ 3.2 GHz
EVGA 680i SLI
Corsair XMS Dominator 4GB
Intel X25-M 160GB
Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatality

Will probably eventually upgrade the CPU/Mobo/RAM but only when it's severely limiting the video card (not often currently at my res with HQ/MQ settings).

Any thoughts/opinions/etc.? Thanks in advance.

 

[cusideabelincoln]

My goodness those things must chug electricity. You should do the upgrade just for the power savings and heat reduction alone.

And you'll most likely get a performance boost or more stable framerates, but I'm not sure how much you'll see.

 

[Bl0cks]

I'm thinking it would be better for you to upgrade your CPU first. I had a E6400 in my rig with my 8800gt, and noticed a significant framerate drop compared to my Q6600 at 1.6Ghz.

 

[Painman]

Gotta agree, the power savings of going to a 5850 over a pair of 8800s would be dramatic. 8800s don't even have an idle mode.

As for performance expectations... I think it'd be reasonable to expect a 5850 to beat a pair of 8800 GTX, and fall short of a pair of SLI'd 260s. If you look at the 5850's big brother, the 5870, there's a card that gives a GTX 295 a run for its money.

I don't think a 3.2 GHz C2D is going to be a problem. The CPU issue was analyzed rather well by BFG10K. At higher res, the saturation tends to happen on the GPU side.

The question to ask yourself right now, is are you willing to pay the prices currently being asked for the card. They're all $50 or more over their original MSRP. I got mine when it was "only" $20 over.

 

[BFG10K]

I'd take a 5850; your CPU will be fine if you stick to reasonable detail levels like 1920x1200 with 4xAA.

 

[lopri]

Definitely a 5850 over SLI anything, or CF anything.

 

[jdwest1]

As Painman said, I expect to be able to nullify the bulk of the CPU impact by simply increasing the video settings. I don't expect to NEED a CPU/MOBO/RAM upgrade until multithreads/cores really work their way into application/system/game performance in a noticeable, impactful way. And that hasn't happened yet (maybe in a year or so). I didn't mention power originally because I fully expect to cut it in half with whatever I choose, whenever I choose it simply for the SLI to single card move.

My primary focus is at the very least routinely (hopefully significantly) beating the performance of my 8800 GTX SLI setup across the board (of course games written for nVidia/PhysX/etc. are excluded). Secondary is to reduce the heat and in turn noise of the setup. It routinely hits 100C+ in intense games like Dragon Age, Batman, etc. Since Anand's reviews of the new ATI line shows a drop into the 80C's I'm not too worried about it overall as I expect any solution to be a great benefit (i.e. like the power savings).

I know they're basically out of stock now (current ATI gen cards) so I'll probably look for them to come back and hopefully get a sale price at Newegg/Amazon/etc. later this year/early next, so no rush on that end.

So that brings me back to performance. Does anyone have some benchmarks (3DMark, gaming, or otherwise) that might help clarify this point? Basically if I can't routinely beat the 8800 GTX SLI performance with a single card setup (5850 or worst case 5870), and of course get the DX11 and other new generation benefits (although I hate to lose PhysX), then I'll hold off for now. Not really interested in another SLI/CF/Dual card setup for the power reason alone. If it becomes a 5850 vs. 5870 deal then I'd be interested in OC results to see if their top points are far enough apart to warrant the extra ~$100. I know an OC'd 5850 ~ a base 5870 at 1920x1200, so I'm more interested in the OC'd results from both if that's relevant.

Thanks again in advance!

 

[jdwest1]

Haha, actually found my old account. Here's my spec:

http://www.anandtech.com/mysystemrig.aspx?rigid=33494

 

[crisium]

You're probably not gonna find direct comparisons. But a 5850 is about equal to 2x 4850s. And a 4850 is generally slightly faster than an 8800 GTX, based on knowing that the 9800GTX is the same or slightly faster, and the 4850 was a tad bit faster until Nvidia was forced to release the 9800GTX+. But who knows, let's find another tangible comparison.

Or look at what the 5850 performs closest to: the GTX 285. Let's compare that against the 8800GTX in SLI (unlabeled one is a Zotac GTX 285 AMP Edition which is slightly overclocked and probably brings it = to 5850 performance):

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/...compare,1516.html?prod[2788]=on&prod[2864]=on

I think it's fair to say that you'd probably not notice anything significant, besides the ridiculous power savings that you'd enjoy.

 

[WildW]

It's hard to say exactly what the difference will be, but my feeling is that it should be a significant boost. A quick look for 8800GT SLI benchmarks shows a lot of results for quite old games, and drivers may well have improved things somewhat, so it may not be fair to use those for a comparison. Perhaps a comparison of experiences can provide some insight.

I recently upgraded to a 5850. I have an E5400 overclocked to 3.6GHz, and for the most part I don't feel CPU limited - the odd CPU dependant graphical effect occasionally has to be turned off, but mostly I max everything including AA on basically every game at 1920x1200. I doubt you'd notice any issues with your CPU.

The most graphically stressful thing I've been running is Far Cry 2, and it sits at 60fps very nearly all the time. Only time it doesn't is when I try to set as much of the world on fire as possible (the flamethrower is so pretty in that game, and Africa is so flammable), when it drops a little into the 40s, and very occasionally high 30's, if the whole screen is full of flames. I was only doing this to try and load up the GPU for overclocking tests Really not sure if 4xAA is necessary either.

There are plenty of benchmarks around for 5850/70 . . what's missing that you're not sure about?

 

[jdwest1]

Thanks Cris, that's what I feared. I just can't justify purchasing a new card for the power savings alone but was hoping to see a reasonable performance improvement.

WW, what card did you upgrade from? Do you have comparative numbers from it? I beat FarCry 2 a while back and haven't tried it since so not sure how it would perform now, but I know I did have to turn off some settings to make it playable when I was playing it. So your numbers/settings are helpful there.

So it appears I'll probably need to wait another generation (at least until the revised version of this gen) to really see the improvement I'm looking for. So I guess I'll revisit this 6 months from now and see where things stand.

Thanks everyone!