If you follow PC hardware news, you may have been hearing about ATI's 5800 series for some time. Well, they're finally here, as yesterday AMD announced that the graphics cards are finally available for purchase. AMD is putting out two cards, the 5850 and the 5870, priced at $250 and $399 respectively. If you haven't heard of these cards before, they're the first graphics cards designed from the ground up to support DirectX 11, so if you plan on gaming on a Windows 7 machine you'll want to look into these.
The benchmarks I've seen so far show the 5870 performing pretty impressively -- it tends to outperform NVIDIA's GTX 285 in most tests, and can hold it's own against the 295. While overall the 295 tends to get slightly better numbers, it's also currently $100 more expensive, and uses up a whole lot more power. That said, don't be surprised if NVIDIA drops the prices on the 200 series soon.
Any of you guys running Windows 7 planning on picking one of these up? Do you care at all about the lack of PhysX?
Jonathan Ross is an Associate Editor in Los Angeles who is obsessed with capybaras. Like, seriously, obsessed. If he's not playing Team Fortress 2 or getting into arguments about why PC gaming is superior, he's either off having a fancy dinner with lots of expensive wine, or sitting on the Destructoid IRC complaining that's he's not off having a fancy dinner.
Likes: Chrono Trigger, Street Fighter, Steam, everything Blizzard and Valve have ever made, playing Angry Birds on the toilet.
Meet the rest of the team
| BBcode help |
| [b]Bold text[/b] |
Bold text |
| [i]Italic text[/i] |
Italic text |
| [url]http://www.dtoid.com/[/url] |
http://www.dtoid.com |
| [url=http://www.dtoid.com/]Web link[/url] |
Web link |
|
| [img]http://www.example.com/robot.jpg[/img] |
 |
Post a comment! You can also post a photo below:
Comment with Facebook
Click connect and comment instantly!
|
Comment with Dtoid
New? SIGN UP - it takes 5 seconds
|
37 comments | showing # 1 to 37
|
Comment with Facebook
Click connect and comment instantly!
|
Comment with Dtoid
New? SIGN UP - it takes 5 seconds
|
Comments policy
Destructoid is an open discussion community. You don't need to "audition" to post a comment - just speak your mind. We respect differing opinions on the site, so have at it. Be smart, funny, insightful, clueless, or cute -- but back it up with substance. Keep your cool, keep it fun. We only ask that you act respectfully and above all: don't be a troll and ruin it for everyone else. Don't bring down gamers or we'll, you know, gently shoot you in the face and stuff you into a flaming mailbox. Each comment is your opportuntity to make this community awesomer. Is that even a word?
Avoiding the banhammer only requires common sense: spamming, trolling, racism, NSFW stuff, and other forms of sucking will not be tolerated. If anyone is griefing please report abuse. Be good. Don't suck!
Contest:
5:00 PM on 09.24.2009
| 
Waiting for Nvidia's Price cuuuuut....keep us informed,Jonas
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_DirectX_10_support
I go with whatever gives me the most bang for my buck, like the HIS HD4850 IceQ4 512MB I got for $80 after MIR.
@septan179 Most if not all current games have DX10. The few that don't are because of Xbox360 crossplatform. Did you ever hear my rant about out of date systems lowering the quality across all platforms? Which by the way wonder if Dragon Age will suffer. I mean once you fall out of graces with the Shader tech your auto screwed in PC gaming especially.
Those two features combined are a pretty big selling point for a nVidia card over an ATI card beyond just performance to performance comparison. If I can get an equivalent card with just a difference of say 5-10% in performance but also obtain both of those features it is really not a question. If the performance difference is more along the lines of 15-25% though I would easily give up PhysX, though would wrestle with CUDA.
@Volomon: But do games really suffer that much for lack of DX10? By most accounts, there is little noticeable difference, other than slightly better graphics and a lower framerate. And Far Cry 2 is the only game I can think of that really significantly benefited from DX10 in terms of fps and image quality (mostly) and that was on 360 and PS3.
I'll worry about DirectX 11 when games use it properly. If DX10 is anything to go by, itll be another year or two.
I'll wait for Nvidias model to be released.
-- Griffinhart