ShaneBaxtor.com

Tonight I found myself taking some photos of the new Gigabyte HD 5770 Super Overclock and it made me think of a few other companies out there and what there stand out series are. While companies like Sapphire have some stand out models unlike MSI and Gigabyte they don’t have the luxury of being able to offer users NVIDIA and ATI.

The HD 5770 SOC though seemed to really cement in my mind why it’s one of the best series. For me there’s two stand out series at the moment, the SOC from Gigabyte and the Lightning from MSI. While I like both series the SOC is the better one on the marketing side of things for the simple reason being that Gigabyte have chosen to take it outside of just the highest end models.

MSI have offered the Lightning in the HD 5870 from ATI, on the NV front we saw them last year give it to some of the higher end GTX 200 series. The next model we should see from them is the GTX 480.

Gigabyte on the other hand have attacked the HD 5770 recently and coming soon is the GTX 470. While we understand that MSI have chosen to reserve the Lightning series to only the best single GPU cards I get this feeling that they’re throwing opportunity away, much in the same way I feel Sapphire have done by not making full use of the ATOMIC series in the HD 5000 line up.

The HD 5870 Lightning was a very technical card and a lot went into it, the HD 5870 SOC on the other hand wasn’t as technical but the end result for many people was a card that was cheaper and faster thanks to the 950MHz core vs the 900MHz core.

Companies need to take advantage of the series that they create, Gigabyte started the SOC series a bit back and have really ran with it. At the same time they’re not just slapping the name onto any model, the HD 5770 is overclocked too 900MHz on the core which clearly warrants it.

Hopefully as time goes on we’ll see companies take more advantage of the series they have and give us even more choices to play with, because while overclocking isn’t hard there’s still a large amount of people out there who don’t want to do it or are just worried about doing it.

No one’s talking about it and while I haven’t had the chance to test it myself a number of people have confirmed that in CrossFireX setups Eyefinity performance has really skyrocketed. In most situations you’re talking about going from not playable to playable.

One person reported that Metro 2033 went form a slide show to an average of 130 FPS.

Metro 2033 has copped a pretty bad rap since launch since most enthusiasts are using ATI cards and the game has struggled with the setups, that could all about to change now.

If you’re running Eyefinity and a CrossFireX setup feel free to drop a line down the bottom and let us know you’re experience with it. I’ll be sure to check it out myself sooner rather than later.

Make sure you go grab the latest 10.5 Drivers from the game.amd.com website here.

I stumbled across this on twitter today which one of the AMD guys posted; it’s really cool and gives people an actual idea of how gaming in Eyefinity differs to just using a single monitor.

To be honest trying to explain things sometimes can be a bit of a pain but this little page means that you no longer need the words; unless they’re words to the website.

At the moment I’m a real Bad Company 2 fan and I’ve spoken in my reviews at TweakTown about just how different the addition of two side monitors are in the game when it comes to noticing people in your peripheral vision.

This does a better job of showing exactly what I mean though with the ability to switch on the fly between one and three monitors in a moving scenario which again paints an even better picture then just a screenshot.

Props have to go to ATI for doing this. Way to increase awareness on Eyefinity while at the same time showing its benefits.

Reviewers have GTX 400 series cards and no doubt that within the community of them talk is happening on what we think of the models. It would come as no surprise to know that now ATI probably have a fair idea about how the GTX 400 series competes against their current line up of video cards.

Word floating about was that if need be a price drop would take place to combat the new cards from NVIDIA; as for a refresh one might be ready but we haven’t heard anything all that solid on that. For now ATI still need to get the Eyefinity6 model launched.

As far as a price drop goes though it seems ATI and its partners are comfortable with how the models sit and with stock becoming a non issue for the cards; they don’t have anything to worry about it seems.

The GTX 400 series has been plagued with issues but within only days we’ll know exactly how the two models perform. There’s no doubt that ATI have a fair idea of how the models perform against their current crop of cards though.

I’ve got an Eyefinity6 card at the moment but am yet to receive an active DVI adapter since what I really want to do with the card is compare it to the HD 5870 1GB at 2560 x 1600 to see just how much the extra memory helps.

Doing some research and talking to partners though it’s clear that they’re preparing to make a HD 5870 2GB; when we say HD 5870 2GB how this differs to the Eyefinity6 is that the card will carry the standard two Dual-Link DVI connectors, HDMI and single DisplayPort for support up to three monitors.

Why we haven’t seen the model yet though? It’s clearly because of stock being an issue for many months with cards becoming really available only now.

As for an ETA there’s no 100% date but I’ve been told it won’t be far away.

Speaking to partners it’s become clear that ATI are preparing for a price drop on its high end models including the HD 5850, HD 5870 and HD 5970. In turn we would probably also see some smaller price drops on the HD 5830 and below to simply keep the value of these products in line with everything else.

What’s interesting though is I’m hearing that the price drop will only happen if they feel threatened by NVIDIA and its new GTX 470 and GTX 480 products. There’s a few thing that need to happen with the new GTX 400 series for this price drop to happen.

First the products have to be competitive against the HD 5850, HD 5870 and HD 5970.

Secondly the stock has to be available or at least the impression that mass stock is coming.

While everyone loves a good price drop it’s clear that ATI are only going to do it if they need too. At the end of the day they’re a business and there’s no need to drop the price if the GTX 400 series doesn’t compete against the HD 5000 series.

I absolutely love that the GTX 400 series is around the corner; and if you have no intension of buying one as you enjoy the high end ATI setup you already have; you should as well since ATI have held nothing back in the driver department lately.

The latest area to get shown love by the Catalyst Driver Team is the new Cross Profiles which will have their first update Monday.

Below is a list of what will be improved when you install the profile:

Heaven – Crossfire profile
Dark Void – Crossfire profile
Singularity – Crossfire profile
Unigine Heaven Demo – Crossfire profile
Just Cause 2 -> Single GPU and Crossfire profile
Battlefield Bad Company 2 -> Crossfire profile
AvP -> Single GPU and Crossfire profile

Ouch! I feel bad for NVIDIA who have chosen to send only one GTX 400 sample to myself and the decision to make it the slower one of the two new models. I think it’s going to look pretty unattractive against a sea of red.

ATI are really on the ball lately; they’re not about to sit on their morals though and hope that the HD 5970 is going to get them through the green minefield that is going to be laid soon. The 10.3 driver set was already looking promising for people with Eyefinity thanks to some good features being implemented; yesterday though AMD dropped a bomb shell when it came to performance improvements of what was being offered in the new driver.

If you don’t know what’s on offer I recommend you check out my blog post from yesterday here.

Instead of making us wait around for a WHQL driver though they’ve thrown the preview driver up giving people the chance to get in on the party now.

You can grab the driver here; of course it’s a beta so blah blah blah it’s at your own risk and what not but I’ve been using it for the past 24 hours and haven’t experienced any problems, let’s just say that the fan hasn’t stopped running on my card and died in Starcraft.

Anyway grab the driver and keep an eye out on TweakTown for a preview of it on a number of ATIs HD 5800 series cards.

The Catalyst 10.3 driver set I’m calling the Holy Crap! driver set because as far as I’m concerned when you look at what it offers they’re the only two words that come to mind.

I’m not going to say much because really the driver notes speak for themselves; on the key feature front we’ve got all those goodies that we saw in the 1-2 Punch article. If you’ve forgotten they include:

ATI Catalyst Mobility – monthly updates for the mobile crowd

ATI Eyefinity Technology Bezel Correction – compensate for your bezels so objects in your game move from one display to the other smoothly

ATI Eyefinity Technology Per Display Control – adjust for differences in each individual displays brightness, color and contrast

ATI Eyefinity Technology Multiple Display Groups – more display groups to give further control of your desktop with three displays or more connected

ATI Eyefinity Technology Display Configuration Switching – easily switch from one display mode to another

3D Stereoscopic 3D driver hooks – enables 3rd party middleware vendors to bring more 3D stereoscopic gaming options

If that wasn’t enough to excite you though the performance improvements are insane:

3DMark Vantage

Overall scores increase by up to 8% with ATI Radeon HD 5970 graphics products
Overall scores increase by up to 4% on ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series products and up to 3% on ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series products

Aliens vs. Predator

Overall performance increases 5% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products

Battleforge

Improves up to 8% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products
Improves up to 3% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Call of Duty: World at War

Improves up to 2% on ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series products
Improves up to 6% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Company of Heroes

Improves up to 6% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products
Improves up to 3% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Crysis and Crysis Warhead

Improves up to 6% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products
Improves up to 2% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Devil May Cry 4

Improves up to 10% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products
Improves up to 6% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

DiRT 2

Improves up to 30% on ATI Radeon HD 5970 graphics products
Improves up to 20% on ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series and ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series products
Improves up to 10% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Improves up to 5% on ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series products
Improves up to 3% on ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series products
Improves up to 2% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Far Cry 2

Improves up to 6% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products
Improves up to 4% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2

Improves up to 3% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – Call of Pripyat Benchmark

Improves up to 10% with Anti-Aliasing enabled on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – Clear Sky

Improves up to 2% with ATI Radeon HD 5970 graphics products
Improves up to 2% on ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series products

Resident Evil 5

Improves up to 5% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products
Improves up to 3% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X.

Improves up to 15% with ATI Radeon HD 5970 graphics products
Improves up to 20% on ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series products and ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series products
Improves up to 3% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Unigine Tropics

Improves up to 5% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products

World in Conflict

Improves up to 5% on ATI Radeon HD 5800 Series products
Improves up to 3% on ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series products
Improves up to 5% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

Wolfenstein

Improves up to 4% on ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series products
Improves up to 4% on ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series products

What makes the driver so great though outside of the massive performance improvements is the fact that ATI have not only concentrated on the HD 5000 series but also given much love to the HD 4800 series.

I’m not sure if this driver was designed to fight the new GTX 400 series from NVIDIA or if it’s just a matter of right place right time, all we can say though is that the quarter is going to come to an end in a very interesting way.

Earlier this month we saw a website say at Cebit that they were looking at the Sapphire HD 5990. This information sent everyone into a bit of a spin thinking that this was ATIs answer to Fermi; a model that isn’t yet realised and been plagued with issues for months. That’s not to say it won’t be good but we’re not all that sure ATI have anything to worry about.

The HD 5970 4GB version from Sapphire is a real model, it’s coming. It’s not going to be called the HD 5990 though. The two big differences in this 4GB version and the 2GB one is that we’ll see double the amount of memory and an overclock on the card.

The 4GB version of the model should be limited to only a few AIBs due to only a limited amount of high clocking cores being available.

The HD 5970 4GB is essentially a HD 5970 with double the amount of memory and handpicked cores. While the extra memory won’t do heaps for overall performance the largest jump is going to come from the increased clock speeds.

At the moment we know of two companies that are going to offer the card, the first is Sapphire who at the moment don’t have a name for the card it seems and the other is XFX who are calling it the HD 5970 Black Edition Limited.

This product isn’t going to be a Fermi killer or anything like that because it’s nothing all that new. I think what you’ll find this model is really doing for ATI is making sure they get coverage over what is going to be a very green second half of March.

Calling the HD 5970 4GB the HD 5990 wouldn’t be the smartest thing to do because ATI would be giving people the impression that the new model is going to offer something new when it’s not. Considering NVIDIA have done this a number of times in the past and it has never been welcomed with open arms we’d be surprised if ATI tried to follow the same path.

Update: If you have a look at Sapphires website you’ll see that they even mention:

Fastest graphics card on the planet

Currently holding the crown for the fastest graphics card available is the HD 5970. SAPPHIRE will introduce at the show a new 4GB version of the SAPPHIRE HD 5970 with a special cooling solution and higher clock speeds that will blow previous versions out of the water!

in the press release that can be seen here. We’re not sure if the HD 5990 name was thrown into a conversation like “I suppose this could be a HD 5990″ and people ran with it.