AMD Shows Radeon Roadmap for Early 2011

Cool!

Cool!

Cool!

Cool!

"fastest DirectX 11 graphics part on the planet"? Correct me if I'm wrong but the GTX580 is still just the fastest SINGLE-GPU card. 5970 is still on top. THG need to school Marcus Yam about computers. Authors of this site used to know what they were talking about.

1) In many benchmarks, the 580 outperforms the 5970. Depending on the site you consult, the 580 is either outperformed by the 5970 in most benchmarks or vice versa, but for simplicity's sake we can assume them equal.

2) The 5970 is a dual GPU board. The 470 in SLI is a lot more powerful and that's the only apples to apples comparison (the 5970 is essentially a 5850 in crossfire and the 470 is the closest competitor to the 5850). It's either 5870 vs 580 or 5970 vs 470 * 2 and Nvidia wins both.

Not that I'm saying I'm fond of the arrogant green guys...

Sure smells like AMD fanboi'ism in here.

has anyone run a comparison of 4 470s or 4 580s vs two 5970s? Or do the nvidia cards not all support quad sli?

Either way, I'm looking forward to the 6970, should have the budget to build a pc by the time it's out, and in theory it should fall into my price range.

And @rdafe, a quad post, really...

Surely a like-for-like comparison would be to compare single cards? Comparing one card to two isn't really apples to apples. Two cards needs a beefier PSU (one those GTX470s will use no less energy than a 5970 despite the performance difference). Often a PSU with 4 PCI-E connectors is needed if using two high-end cards, and an SLI/Crossfire mobo.

It's a simple question - who has the fastest card? Keep in mind it's mostly only people who use these sites who would give a damn how many GPUs their card has, or even be aware that their 5970, 4870X2 etc has two GPUs and not one. It's a single product that goes into a single slot. Unless future SLI/Crossfire is a consideration, the fact that a card has two GPUs is irrelevant. FPS is what counts.

Not an AMD fanboy either... for the record, my last card was a GeForce. AnUnusedUsername - like Silmarunya pointed out, dual GTX470s would outperform a single HD5970 (due partly to the fact that the GTX470 is faster than the HD5850 and partly to superior SLI scaling, with an FPS gain on a second GF100 GPU of around 80% vs ~70% on the second Radeon GPU) so you definitely wouldn't need four... and two GTX580s would outperform two HD5970s, again due to scaling. Since the 5970 is already dual-GPU, you're moving up from two to four with the Radeon (massively diminishing returns as you add GPUs beyond 2x - 5970+5870 CF will add around 50%, or 60-65% from a second HD5970) whereas you're getting excellent SLI scaling going from one GPU to two with the GTX580s. With the Radeon 6 series, both companies are finally offering almost perfect two-way scaling, but going up to three or four won't give much of a gain.

Silmarunya - I don't know what prices are on the HD5870 and GTX580 in the States, but in Britain you're looking at £235 for an HD5870 vs. £400 for the GTX580 (scan.co.uk) so I'm not sure if that would be a fair comparison. There's only really two questions that matter - who offers best performance for the money, and (to a much lesser extent), who has the fastest flagship. AMD wins the latter (and has done for a year now) and as for the former, both companies' prices are dropping like stones and pricing their products very competitively.