Sapphire Radeon HD5870 Vapor-X Video Card 21161-03 Review

Olin Coles · #1 2nd November 2009, 10:10 PM

Sapphire Radeon HD5870 Vapor-X Video Card 21161-03 Review

AMD has retaken the crown for superior graphical power with their ATI Radeon HD 5870 video card, and consumers have confirmed that this is the hottest graphics accelerator of the moment. Armed with 1600 shader cores, the 40nm Cypress GPU claims to push video game frame rates well-beyond what NVIDIA offers from their GeForce GTX 285 counterpart. While the list of DirectX 11 video games has just started to grow, with one of the first being a free Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) named BattleForge. Perhaps ATI has created the perfect storm for their Radeon HD 5800-series by offering a price-competitive graphics card with several free games included or available. While NVIDIA toils away with CUDA and PhysX, ATI is busy delivering the next generation of hardware for the gaming community to enjoy. Sapphire factory overclocks the Cypress GPU and adds their own custom cooling solution, named Vapor-X. In this article Benchmark Reviews tests the Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 Vapor-X video card 21161-03 against a cross-section of modern graphics accelerators.

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Olle P · #2 3rd November 2009, 02:46 AM

I think the review has one major flaw throughout: The assumption that the main competition is nVidia GeForce GTX285. It isn't. The main competitor to the Vapor-X is the reference design HD 5870!

Therefore a more exhaustive comparison pointing at the differences would be nice, rather than simply repeating the already well known general features of the HD 5870.

The bottom line for any potential buyer would still be: Should I buy the Vapor-X or go with the reference design?

Cheers
Olle

David Ramsey · #3 4th November 2009, 04:32 PM

I...an an nVidia fanboy. I haven't had an ATI card in my systems since, oh, the original "GeForce 2" card way back when. Heck, my HP Blackbird has two 280GTX cards, and I bought them back when they were $600 each.

Since I live only a few blocks from Olin, I bugged him to lend me the Sapphire 5870 Vapor-X card. He kindly agreed, and I've been running it for a couple of days.

In the games I play, it's as fast or faster than the 280GTXs in SLI. The benchmarks for any particular game may slant a few FPS one way or the other, but really, they're pretty much equivalent. This is a massive win for the 5870 'cause:

1. It costs $400 or thereabouts. The cheapest 285GTX at NewEgg is $370. And you'd need two to get 5870 level performance.
2. Only one card and slot instead of two. Uses perhaps 200 watts less power under full load for the same level of performance as the nVidia SLI setup.
3. Two 280GTXs at full load = LOUD. 5870 Vapor-X at full load = quiet.
4. Subtle, but still important. I don't know if this has been quantified anywhere, but gameplay seems smoother overall with the 5870, free of the occasional fits and jerks I see with my SLI setup. I'm guessing this is due to the complex issue of synchronizing and load-balancing a game across multiple GPUs, and you'd probably see the same issues with Crossfire. The point is that given equivalent performance, one GPU is better than two.

Now, all that said, I'd like to keep an nVidia card around, because the Folding @ home people still haven't gotten around to optimizing their code for modern ATI GPUs, and besides I have one of those nVidia 3D gaming setups. So I stuck a 280GTX back into my system. It had to go in the first slot, because if the Radeon was in the first slot, it would physically touch the back of the 280 and its central fan was completely blocked. Putting the 280 in first worked will because the Radeon's lack of a backplate gives a nice gap between the cards. If only I could tell my Rampage Extreme motherboard that the card in the second slot is the primary card...oh well...

And it all works, more or less; at least the 3D stuff still does. But it just annoys the hell out of me that nVidia sees fit to deliberately disable features of their driver, like Physx, when they detect an ATI card as the primary display. BTW, folding won't work either. The hoops you have to jump through to work around this are clumsy, and nVidia's explanation that they "couldn't guarantee the proper operation" of these features is so transparently false I'm embarrassed for them.

Hey, nVidia! I'm a retail customer! I bought your damn card! Where the hell do you get off deliberately crippling it?

Bruce Normann · #4 4th November 2009, 04:46 PM

You know some guy made a patch available to (re)enable Physx......
I agree that NVIDIA has acted shabbily in this.

Bruce.

Quote:

Originally Posted by David Ramsey

And it all works, more or less; at least the 3D stuff still does. But it just annoys the hell out of me that nVidia sees fit to deliberately disable features of their driver, like Physx, when they detect an ATI card as the primary display. BTW, folding won't work either. The hoops you have to jump through to work around this are clumsy, and nVidia's explanation that they "couldn't guarantee the proper operation" of these features is so transparently false I'm embarrassed for them.

Hey, nVidia! I'm a retail customer! I bought your damn card! Where the hell do you get off deliberately crippling it?

David Ramsey · #5 4th November 2009, 10:07 PM

I know about the patch, but still...

Olle P · #6 5th November 2009, 12:34 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by David Ramsey

Since I live only a few blocks from Olin, I bugged him to lend me the Sapphire 5870 Vapor-X card. He kindly agreed, and I've been running it for a couple of days. ...

Nice to have a second, and more subjective, opinion for a balance.

Quote:

Originally Posted by David Ramsey

... gameplay seems smoother overall with the 5870, free of the occasional fits and jerks I see with my SLI setup.

What OS and DirX versions do you use?
The ability to use hardware features form D3D 10.1 and 11 is (by rumour) supposed to help things a bit, but I don't know if that has anything to do with your experience.

Quote:

Originally Posted by David Ramsey

... nVidia's explanation that they "couldn't guarantee the proper operation" of these features is so transparently false I'm embarrassed for them.

I can actually buy that explanation straight off!
Nvidia can't guarantee the function. Fine!
But even for their own drivers they don't guarantee anything, so that issue shouldn't be an argument for disabling these features...

Cheers
Olle

David Ramsey · #7 5th November 2009, 09:08 AM

I was using Win 7 Ultimate 64 bit, in particular playing Crysis Warhead, which is DirectX 10 I believe. The only DirectX 11 thing I have on my system is the "Heaven" benchmark.

Olle P · #8 6th November 2009, 12:08 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by David Ramsey

The only DirectX 11 thing I have on my system is the "Heaven" benchmark.

No, with Win7 you most certainly also have the DirectX 11 runtime files (which is the actual DirectX) installed, which is the key issue here.

There is a possibility that the D3D part of DX11 used some tricks to make better use of the added hardware possibilities when you used the HD5870, even if it wasn't called for by the application.

Cheers
Olle

David Ramsey · #9 6th November 2009, 04:41 AM

Not sure what you mean by this, Olle. Of course Win 7 includes the DirectX 11 runtime, but if nothing's calling it, it's not an issue at all.

DirectX 11 defines a number of new features (like tessellation) that require specific hardware support in a graphics card. This is why nVidia can't simply issue a driver update to enable these features on my 280GTXs. Without this hardware support, the DirectX 11 runtime is pretty useless, and the system falls back to 10 or 9 as appropriate for the display hardware.

Olle P · #10 6th November 2009, 07:55 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by David Ramsey

... if nothing's calling it, it's not an issue at all.

Pure speculation from my side, but perhaps there's some "intelligence" that find a way to use the new ATI GPU more efficiently than the older ones from Nvidia, even for "older" features?

Quote:

Originally Posted by David Ramsey

Without this hardware support, the DirectX 11 runtime is pretty useless, and the system falls back to 10 or 9 as appropriate for the display hardware.

Quite the opposite, I'd say.
If you try to run a DX11 application against the DX10 runtime, it will just reply with an error message; "I don't understand the request!".
If you run the same application against the DX11 runtime it will simply take note: "The installed hardware can't execute the request, let's translate the request to something the hardware can execute and come up with a similar result."
It's the DX11 runtime that lets the hardware "fall back" to what it can do instead of not doing anything. (Then the fact that many new applications let you chose what DX version to use, or set it automatically based on the installed hardware, is a completely different matter.)

Cheers
Olle