JohnCoffey wrote:
Atrocity Exhibition wrote:
LewieP wrote:
Fuck it, I think I am ordering
this, they are not far from here, so I could pick up in person.
Good idea/bad idea?
That's the card I have - runs everything I chuck at it at 1920x1200, maxed out. Although admittedly I've never tried Crysis on it.
Currently playing Modern Warfare 2 and Bad Company 2 beta and they're lovely.
Keeps nice and quiet under load as well.
However. If you want cooler, calmer, quieter and far less power usage then get a 5770. Now admittedly on it's lonesome the 5770 isn't as fast but it does offer full DX11 support.
The 4890 is the quietest 'proper' graphics card I've ever had, I've had a play around in CCC with manual fan speeds, and by my estimation, the fan never spins above 35% when left to its own devices, even during an intensive gaming session, or in other words, I can't hear it above my case and CPU fans - at stock speeds the 4890 is about 15% faster than a 5770 at stock speeds.
I can max the 4890 out in CCC at 1GHz core and 1.2GHz RAM and it's entirely happy, but the fan does get audible when gaming - at that level it's kicking out polys over 25% faster than a 5770, and whilst the 5770 overclocks nicely as well, it can only narrow the difference back down to around 15%. (With pretty nasty diminishing returns at high resolutions due to a lack of memory bandwidth.)
DX11 is neither here nor there in my book, we've scarcely got any games with noticeable DX10 enhancements, let alone DX11 (Custom PC took a close look at DIRT 2 recently and basically said, 'Ummm, yeah, it says it's running in DX11 mode, but it looks the same and runs about 30% slower than if you leave it in DX9 mode') - considering pretty much all games are derived from console code these days (the 360 essentially being a five year old DX9 PC), don't get too excited about DX11 enhancements in games any time soon.
(The games I've played with DX10 modes, I've ended up going back to DX9 mode for speed and stability, even a brand new game (still in beta) such as Bad Company 2, the official advice when it comes to performance and stability is, 'Edit the ini file to force DX9 mode, even on DX10 capable hardware.')
All that said, the 5770 is a bit cheaper than the 4890, and it's certainly a pretty capable card, so either would be a reasonable choice IMO.
Here's one of many similar quotations you can find on various tech sites, the 1GB 5770 is slower than a 1GB 4870, let alone a 4890, and it's also lacking memory bandwidth, which will hurt in the most demanding games and/or at high resolutions: (This comment refers to a 4870, which is a fair bit slower than a 4890),
"The value of the 5770 in particular is clearly not going to be in its performance. Compared to AMD’s 4870, it loses well more than it wins, and if we throw out Far Cry 2, it’s around 10% slower overall. It also spends most of its time losing to NVIDIA’s GTX 260, which unfortunately the 4870 didn’t have so much trouble with. AMD clearly has put themselves in to a hole with memory bandwidth, and the 5770 doesn’t have enough of it to reach the performance it needs to be at.......
So here’s the bottom line for the 5770: Unless you absolutely need to take advantage of the lower power requirements of the 40nm process (e.g. you pay a ton for power) or you strongly believe that DirectX 11 will have a developer adoption rate faster than anything we’ve seen before for DirectX, the 1GB 4870 or GTX 260 is still the way to go"