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5870 Vs "6870" ..

Associate
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I've seen people saying the 6870 is going to BLOW away the 5870... (i didnt know any benchmarks were out for it?) but will it really? I bought my 5870around 4-5 months ago and was planning on getting a 2nd when the 6000 series comes out (and the price tags for the 5000 series lowers) and xfireing them.

I do try to keep my pc just in the high end range, without going too mad price wise. Mostly so i can play most games on Very high or high. So will getting two 5870's be good enough to run most games in the near future at high? (Not counting the spec hungry games like metro 2033 :p ) or will it be worthless compared to just one 6870.

I have a feeling no info is out about the 6870 yet, and its mostly the hardcore ATI fan boys starting the hype early :p lol So just in your Opinion. As i allready have a 5870 would i see a better improvment getting a 2nd 5870, or selling my 5870 (£200 minus the bay fee's -_-) and spending out another £200 on a 6870)
 
Caporegime
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I have seen claims of at best +30% performance over the 5870.

However, there are rumours it has vastly superior tesselation but these my be untrue.

I won;t call that blowing away. However, it all depends on price. If you knew how much a 6870 would be it might be best to sell your 5870 a week or so before hte 6870 and then buy one.

But the batteries have failed in my crystal ball.
 
Soldato
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Usually new high end cards are as fast as two of the previous high end cards, eg 5870 is roughly as fast as the 4870x2. But who knows.
 
Soldato
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I can't imagine a 6870 coming in with a rounded £400 price tag. If the 480 sits at it's current price I think the 6870 should fall in line price/performance wise so maybe just a bit more than a reference 480? Of course if it comes in lower with the better performance it's expected to have then nvidia will be in BIG trouble unless it comes up with a reply (485? Dual card? Etc).
 
Soldato
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I have a 5830, and I'm planning on getting another for xfire, but I'd recommend to anyone to avoid and get SLI 460s instead if they can. :p

It would mean me changing my CPU, Motherboard, RAM and graphics cards to go to my ideal setup, and I can't be bothered, so I'm going to try xfire 5830s anyway just because I facy trying it for myself, but I've had enough issues with ATI drivers so far to put me off on my next build.

Next time round will probably be something Intelified with DDR4 RAM and two nVidia cards.
 
Man of Honour
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States the person who appears to own two in x-fire? :confused:

That might be why :p


AMD have stated several times that the 6 series will be more about increasing the efficency of the hardware, reducing bottlenecks, etc. so I'd expect to see some large boosts in the performance in certain areas but not a huge increase in overall performance. One area thats been mentioned several times is tessellation performance.
 
Caporegime
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Rubbish, I've seen 3-4 people suggest the 6870 makes sense if it will be roughly twice as fast, they are all Nvidia fanboys trying to ignore logic and make the 6870 seem like a failure.

The latest info puts it around 400mm2 in size, actual specs unknown, a fairly heavy tweak to the shaders, tweak not massive change. Instead of clusters of 5 shaders, its clusters of 4 better shaders that take up the space of at a guess roughly 4.5 shaders in the 5870. There have been die size space savings with more efficient uncore and the 15% core size on top of that for extra rops/tmu's/etc.

Its most likely a 1800-2000 shader, slightly better shader, 256bit mem bus, higher clocked gddr5 noticeably, so has a decent bandwidth bump anyway. I'm sure there will be some situations where the better shaders will be massively ahead, and some where they will be behind in different games I reckon you'll see anything from a 15% to 50% bump, with the general theme being 30-35% faster.

It won't be £400, I'd be VERY surprised if the 6870 was £350, more likely a 6870 at £300, a 6850 probably at £220, 6770 at 460gtx 1gb price(or just below it to REALLY pee Nvidia off).

We'll have to see on the ROPs/TMU numbers, did they just increase the efficiency so the same number can power more shaders, or more rops/tmu's, probably a minor bump in them aswell.

It will beat a 480gtx in most situations, while being smaller, cheaper and using less power, that much is almost certain.

The only people that will claim it should be double the speed and is therefore crap, are those who don't understand things like physics, and transistor counts. Nvidia and AMD should have released a 32nm part end of this year, TSMC canceled the process, rather than doubling the transistor count on with probably a slightly smaller end core and lower price and doubling performance, doubling the transistor count would required doubling core size, which at the 5870/gf100 size would involve increasing core cost by several hundred quid.

Wafer $5000, 100 5870's per wafer, $50 a core, double the size, you end up with 25-30 a wafer, $5000/25 =200, 4 times the cost. A double size GF100 would likely yield 10 working cores per wafer, max, at $1000 per core, its just not doable on the same 40nm process.

The only people suggesting tesselation performance will be a key area to improve performance, are nuts, if as a side effect of better shaders able to do more complex things quicker performance goes up, fantastic, if with a 15% die size increase they focus on tesselation performance, used effectively in maybe one game at the moment, rather than focus on increasing standard all around performance, which would help in EVERY game, they'd be literally mental.
 
Man of Honour
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The only people suggesting tesselation performance will be a key area to improve performance, are nuts, if as a side effect of better shaders able to do more complex things quicker performance goes up, fantastic, if with a 15% die size increase they focus on tesselation performance, used effectively in maybe one game at the moment, rather than focus on increasing standard all around performance, which would help in EVERY game, they'd be literally mental.

AMD developers, etc. have mentioned on twitter/facebook and so on that tessellation is one area that will see a substantial performance increase... so I don't think its so nuts to suggest it - even if it doesn't make sense given the useage that doesn't mean AMD won't do it.
 
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Wafer $5000, 100 5870's per wafer, $50 a core, double the size, you end up with 25-30 a wafer, $5000/25 =200, 4 times the cost. A double size GF100 would likely yield 10 working cores per wafer, max, at $1000 per core, its just not doable on the same 40nm process.

The only people suggesting tesselation performance will be a key area to improve performance, are nuts, if as a side effect of better shaders able to do more complex things quicker performance goes up, fantastic, if with a 15% die size increase they focus on tesselation performance, used effectively in maybe one game at the moment, rather than focus on increasing standard all around performance, which would help in EVERY game, they'd be literally mental.

You say double the size, but your numbers are suggesting a 4x increase in size. A 225mm2 core, if it's a square will be 15mmx15mm. To double the size of the core, it'd be 450mm2 which would be 21mm x 21mm. Such an increase in size wouldn't take 100 yeilds per wafer down to 25, but rather more around the 70 per wafer region.
 
Soldato
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Rubbish, I've seen 3-4 people suggest the 6870 makes sense if it will be roughly twice as fast, they are all Nvidia fanboys trying to ignore logic and make the 6870 seem like a failure.

I'll hold my hands up and admit that previously I've stated I wouldn't be surprised if the new cards offered 70% better performance. I base that on the transition from the 3870 to the 4870 which was on the same manufacturing process but looking back I think power and die size will be a limit the 6000 series gains.
 
Caporegime
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AMD developers, etc. have mentioned on twitter/facebook and so on that tessellation is one area that will see a substantial performance increase... so I don't think its so nuts to suggest it - even if it doesn't make sense given the useage that doesn't mean AMD won't do it.

Got any links to statements? Not questioning you, just wondering if they don't mean generally in the next year/two, or maybe drivers, mostly guys who do twitter type stuff for AMD are driver guys. I've said before though, their tesselator being a single block is pretty easy to massively increase the power for a very small die size increase, still think its nuts to waste a 15% die size bump on tesselation when 28nm is next year and frankly will offer, what, similar transistor count to now at maybe 30-35% of the current size, IE 28nm is a two process jump forward, and to glofo, to a significantly higher quality fab. Few people would upgrade to a 6870 if it was 5% faster in general but 50% faster in tesselation, in 3 games. While lots would upgrade if it was 35-40% faster, but didn't have great tesselation performance.

You say double the size, but your numbers are suggesting a 4x increase in size. A 225mm2 core, if it's a square will be 15mmx15mm. To double the size of the core, it'd be 450mm2 which would be 21mm x 21mm. Such an increase in size wouldn't take 100 yeilds per wafer down to 25, but rather more around the 70 per wafer region.

I have no idea why you think the physical length of each side not being double doesn't take up twice the space. Its a wafer, its not a long thin piece of silicon and you can increase the width as much as you want. Double the size and you'll more than half the amount of cores you get off a wafer as yield goes down at a non linear rate as core size goes up. If there were 100 potential cores at 225mm2, then at 450mm2 you'd have probably 44-47potential cores, a silicon wafer is circular, meaning squares don't fit in perfectly, the bigger the square the more space lost on the edge the bigger the cores get, in general. But thats before yields go down, if on the 225mm2, 100 potential cores, you only got 80 working cores, or a 80% yield, that yield would be substantially down if you doubled the core size, its all theoretical with the numbers I'm using because they arent' real, but the yield's will go down exponentially and at one point just become almost completely unworkable.

At 500mm2 (a bit more, 523 iirc) the GF100 is for all intents and purposes, unmanufacturable, it can't be made at a profit because yields are so painfully low. If AMD have gone from a 330-340mm2 core to a 400mm2, and Nvidia dropped down to a little under 400mm2, you can bet that above 400mm2 is where the yields start to drop very dramatically.

15mm side's up to a 21mm side, doesn't mean a 1/4 drop in cores per wafer, it will mean a noticeably over 50% drop in cores per wafer.

Draw a square, divide it into 15mm sided smaller squares, then divide it into 21mm sided squares, see how big the difference is ;)

The same will happen the other way, drop the size of a 5870 by half, a 5770, and you'll get more than double the cores per wafer, because then out of 200 potential cores, the yield will be higher again, call it 90%, so you'd get 180 cores, vs 80 5870 cores, more than double.

I'll hold my hands up and admit that previously I've stated I wouldn't be surprised if the new cards offered 70% better performance. I base that on the transition from the 3870 to the 4870 which was on the same manufacturing process but looking back I think power and die size will be a limit the 6000 series gains.

The 5870 was designed for the 40nm process from the ground up, on an efficient process, the 3870 wasn't, its a cut down design from a 65nm part that was then changed into a 80nm part, it was on a brand new 55nm process, literally the first card on it, and it wasn't even close to optimised, they stripped out about 30% of the core before making the 4870, it had a 512bit internal ringbus which took up 20-25% of the die space. Basically the same core with a crossbar memory controller, designed for 55nm and coming out 6 months later would have been half the size of a 4870. Theres very little to strip out this time around.

The 5870 is a really quite ridiculously good design. The 480gtx is what 60% larger, and offers 10-20% performance improvement, the 5870 is already pretty damn efficient. The 3870, was not, for its core size it was quite horrible, while the 4870 was truly fantastic in terms of efficiency, 4870-5870 lost some of the die size/performance because they increased the size 10-15% to account for some, "issues", with the TSMC process.
 
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Soldato
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i love it when you guys talk all teckie :D
blows my mind that you know all this stuff and to be able to type it out knowing exactly what it all means.
me, all i want to know, will my wife let me get one ? :D
 
Associate
OP
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i love it when you guys talk all teckie :D
blows my mind that you know all this stuff and to be able to type it out knowing exactly what it all means.
me, all i want to know, will my wife let me get one ? :D

Lol me too!.. but i hate when u get nerds/geeks on here argueing over petty little things like its a matter of life and death -_- I start a new job in two weeks working in a college IT department >< lol hope they dont expect me to know half of this :p All i know is how to make em, keep em up and running and remove nasty iky virus's :p

....P.s ..guys all i wanted was a yes or no to getting a 2nd 5870 :p not to start a nerdy world war 3 lol
 
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