In the test 15 years ago: two Radeon HD 5970s were half as good

In the test 15 years ago: two Radeon HD 5970s were half as good 33 comments

With the Radeon HD 5970, AMD offered a real beast of a graphics card, which was the fastest graphics card on the market with two RV870 GPUs. In the test 15 years ago, two of these monsters formed a CrossFire quad group for everyone for whom the best was not enough.

Summary :

Dual Radeon HD 5970

The Radeon HD 5970 was already the fastest graphics card on the market with two RV870 GPUs, but thanks to ATI’s CrossFire technology, two of these models could be combined. Anyone considering this should expect costs of around 1,200 euros just for the graphics cards. Additionally, such a system with four GPUs also imposes higher requirements on power supply, cooling, and CPU. In practice, a Quad-CrossFire network was of interest to very few users.

Radeon HD 4870 2.15 billion 2 × approx. 1.4 billion production 55nm 40nm 55nm chip clock 2 × 750 MHz 725 MHz 850 MHz 2 × 725 MHz 2 × 576 MHz shader clock 2 × 750 MHz 725 MHz 850 MHz 2 × 725 MHz 2 × 1242 MHz shader units
(MADD) 2 × 160 (5D) 288 (5D) 320 (5D) 2 × 320 (5D) 2 × 240 (1D) FLOPS (MADD/ADD) 2 × 1,200 GFLOPS 2,090 GFLOPS 2,720 GFLOPS 2 × 2,320 GFLOPS 2 × 894 GFLOPS ROPs 2 × 16 32 2 × 32 2 × 28 Pixel rate 2 × 12,000 MPix/s 23,200 MPix/s 27,200 MPix/s 2 × 23,200 MPix/s 2 × 16 128 MPix/s TMU 2 × 40 72 80 2 × 80 TAU 2 × 40 72 80 2 × 80 Texelfüllrate 2 × 30,000 MTex/s 52,200 MTex/s 68,000 MTex/s 2 × 58,000 MTex/s 2 × 46,080 MTex/s Shader-Model SM 4.1 SM 5 SM 4 Windows efficient
Power saving function ✓ Memory quantity 2 × 1024 MB GDDR5 1024 MB GDDR5 2 × 1024 MB GDDR5 2 × 896 MB GDDR3 Memory clock 2 × 1800 MHz 2000 MHz 2400 MHz 2 × 2000 MHz 2 × 999 MHz Memory interface 2 × 256 bits 256 bits 2 × 256 bits 2 × 448 bits Memory bandwidth 2 × 115,200 MB/s 128,000 MB/s 153,600 MB/s 2 × 128,000 MB/s 2 × 111,888 MB/s

While a single Radeon HD 5970 already had to deal with multi-GPU issues like micro-stutters, high power consumption, and noise, these issues were even greater with two Radeon HD 5970s. Additionally, all four GPUs effectively only had 1,024 MB of video memory available, because each of the GPUs had to contain all the data needed to render a frame. This in turn limited the benefits of a quad-CrossFire network, as computing power theoretically increased massively, but higher graphics settings also meant higher memory requirements.

PowerColor Radeon HD 5970 Image 1 of 3

Performance increased in a more theoretical way

Anyone who bought two graphics cards instead of one was hoping for twice the performance. In practice, the scaling of multi-GPU technologies such as Nvidia SLI and AMD CrossFire was significantly lower. This was due to the technology used. Both SLI and CrossFire rely on so-called alternate image rendering, in which GPUs connected together alternately calculate an image (image), which is then output one after the other. While scaling was acceptable with two GPUs, generally above 50%, it decreased significantly with each additional GPU.

The test showed that the expected additional performance depended largely on the chosen game and settings. In some cases, the Quad-CrossFire combination was able to deliver almost double the performance in one game, only to then deliver almost the same or even worse performance than a single Radeon HD 5970 in other settings. The problem was the CrossFire profiles that AMD had to store in each individual game’s driver in order to accelerate them decently using multiple GPUs. If there was no profile or only a moderate profile, performance was poor – conversely, this meant that lesser-known games probably ran worse. On average, the additional performance of two Radeon HD 5970s was almost 35% better than the performance of one Radeon HD 5970.

The B grades seemed disastrous, as expected. The temperature was approaching 100 degrees Celsius, the volume was deafening at 65 dB(A), and the power consumption of almost 600 watts was astronomical for the time. Everything that was bad about CrossFire was even worse with Quad-CrossFire.

Conclusion

In practice, a CrossFire network of four graphics cards was not recommended. The high acquisition and operating costs were disproportionate to the low additional performance that users could expect. Added to this were the high temperatures and annoying noises, poor CrossFire profiles, and micro-stutters. Together, this resulted in an incredibly unconvincing package.

In the category “In the test 15 years ago”, the editorial team has been consulting the test archive every Saturday since July 2017. Below we list the last 20 articles in this series:

AMD’s Radeon HD 5670 offered DirectX 11 for 79 euros. HTC’s Touch2 was an economical smartphone at 270 euros. The advantage of SSDs over hard drives in everyday life. Orochi from Razer for the pleasure of playing on mobile via Bluetooth. BlackBerry’s Bold 9700 was a potential smartphone. New Super Mario Bros. was also a success. WiiNvidia’s cheap GeForce GT 240 was too expensive Noctua’s The NH-D14 was the ultimate CPU air cooler. The Radeon HD 5970 was fast and choppy. Corsair‘s Obsidian 800D was ideal for water cooling. Saphir earned a recommendation over the Radeon HD 5750. AMD’s Eyefinity guaranteed gaming pleasure on three screens. The ATis Radeon HD 5750 was too expensive despite a recommended price of 115 euros. Scythes Zipang 2 as a Silent-compatible top-blowing coolerATis Radeon HD 5770 offered DirectX 11 from 140 eurosThe Radeon HD 5850 as an affordable DirectX 11 entry levelATest Radeon HD 5870 as the first graphics card with DirectX 11Core i5-750, i7-860 and Intel i7-870 on Socket 1156Cooler Masters Hyper 212 Plus as a budget coolerIntel’s SSD The X25-M Gen 2 was the champion with 280MB/s Nokia’s N97 would have liked to be a smartphone