Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"But have we really seen enhanced “power, performance, and reliability”? We are accustomed to seeing very small improvements in performance from one software update to the next. If every driver provides a performance bump, there should be a big difference between the first driver that supported the 5870 and the one AMD blogged about last month, right?"

While the easiest way to see a performance jump in your 3D gaming is through the purchase of bigger, better, badder hardware, diligent driver updates can also help. Tom's Hardware runs a thorough test with the hotness from last year to see just how much of a difference you can expect. While I do not think the figures will directly translate to their other cards, I do believe that regardless of which GPU you are packing, up-to-date drivers will improve things. The only concern to me is bloat. Driver updates help with performance often because of optimizations, sometimes even on individual games. All that optimization data takes up space. The installers for video card drivers and its associated software is often in the 90-100MB range, and that is compacted. Do you keep your drivers fresh, or only update them when something goes wrong?

"Two years ago, AMD’s ATI division decided to bow out of the game of building huge, hot chips that were expensive to make, ceding the high-end glory to Nvidia’s GT200 chip. That’s not to say AMD gave up on performance; it instead adopted the mantra of building the best performance GPU within a certain cost and power envelope. The Radeon HD 5800 series, originally code-named RV870, is the culmination of that approach."

If you're looking for some serious pixel pushing power, the newly released Radeon 5870 should be close to the top of your list. While some dual GPU configurations still sit on top, it seems as if ATI is starting to follow the trend that CPUs took 4-5 years ago. Instead of going the faster, hotter, hungrier route, requiring a nuclear reactor and wind tunnel to maintain, lean and mean is what's hot. The 5870 admittedly will gulp down a hefty 188 watts of power (Still less than the GTX 295s 289 watts!) when in full use, when idle, it putters along at a mere 27 watts. I am just glad that they are going this route. Performance is still important, but there are a lot of other factors coming into consideration, like power usage, noise, number of displays and physical size. The 5870 is definitely an ehtusiast card, but its legacy, as shown in the less models, will benefit us all.