ATI’s Radeon HD5970 Hemlock - DirectX 11, lots-o-cores, multiple displays, over-clockable

Posted by Jon Peddie on November 24th 2009 | Comments Closed |
Categories: Hardware Review
Tags: gpu ati opencl directx amd graphics pmark overclock benchmark

Number five in its series of new AIBs, ATI as promised delivered the dual chip HD5970 Radeon board. It’s killer fast, easy on the power supply and pocketbook, and has bonuses like multi-display output and over clocking tools.

The board comes with 2GB of DDR5, one each for each GPU. The GPUs get to the PCIe lanes via a gen2 PLX PCIe bridge chip.

We ran a series of tests on the board in Windows 7 and the results were very impressive—without over-clocking. ATI has a lot of headroom in the RV870 Evergreen GPU, and the two of them on the Hemlock board have been slightly detuned to stay within power supply and temperature bounds. To do that ATI decided to go with a smaller power supply solution by selecting a 6-pin + 8-pin power connector while still using the components from the 400W board design.

To further support the enthusiasts ATI included a number of components strictly to support over-clocking:

  • Fast volterra digital regulators that allow more current than the board draws at default settings.
  • Fast ceramic Japanese 47 μF capacitors as part of the voltage regulations and smoothing.
  • A new, massive vapor-chamber that ATI claims can pulls up to 400W worth of heat away from the GPUs.
  • An SMSC fan controller that monitors multiple temperatures and optimizing fan speed and acoustics.
  • High-speed 5.0 Gbps-rated GDDR5.
  • And the RV870’s 1600 processors which can be over-clocked.

And of course the HD5970 runs in DirectX 11. However, we only had one benchmark to run DX11 tests in: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

Pmark

The Pmark score shows the new ATI Radeon HD 5970 AIB to be the hands down best board available today.

The Pmark is a three parameter test

The PMark

Where:

  • Performance is expressed in 3DMark Pre-set Extreme Vantage score
  • Price is expressed in US dollars (NextTag data used)
  • Power is expressed in watts of the AIB

When Performance is expressed in FPS then the FPS score is multiplied by 100 to put it in the same range as the 3D Vantage scores.

Figure 1: Pmark for contemporary high-end AIBs. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)

The Pmark shows ATI’s sweet-spot strategy is working pretty well and delivering the best balance of price-performance and power consumption.

ATI’s new Radeon HD5970 dual GPU AIB (source AMD)

Forgetting about price or power consumption, we tested the AIBs in a few games and Vantage to give an overall impression of what they have to offer.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Prypiat

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has proven to be one of the most enduring games in a long time with mods and updates. Call of Pripyat is a sequel to Shadow of Chernobyl. Although Call of Pripyat is already available in German-speaking countries, a translated version is still being finished and isn't due for release until the first quarter of 2010.However, it was the first to show up with a DirectX 11 interface, and to have a benchmark sequence in it. It also offers three environmental conditions: Sunny day, Rainy day, and Night. We tested it in DirectX 11 with two ATI AIBs, and then again in DirectX 10.1 with the same AIBs plus an Nvidia GTX295, and the results can be seen in the charts.

Figure 2: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat DirectX 11 tests. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)

The AIBs were run with hardware accelerated tessellation on and off (W/O Tess), at high resolutions, and with 4XAA always on. The dual GPU HD5970 showed pretty good scaling (average of average day) of 41.7% with its normal 725 MHz HD5970 clocking and the HD5870 running at 850MHz—a clock difference of 14.7%.

In DirectX 10.1 the Nvidia GTX295 did surprisingly well, although it wouldn’t run at max (2560x1600) res.

Figure 3: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat DirectX 10.1 tests. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)

The scaling was better in DX 10.1 reaching an average of 42.5%

Unigine Tropics

We ran our first set of synthetic tests using Unigine’s DriectX 11 Tropics benchmark, and compared several boards, as well as a dual board Crossfire combination against the HD5970, the results are shown in the Unigine Tropics chart.

Figure 4: ATI Radeon HD5970 dual GPU AIB Unigine benchmark results and comparisons. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)

In order to make the most use out of the 3200 processors on the 5970 AIB we things at the max toggling ambient occlusion (AC), and varying anti-aliasing (AA) or anti-isotropic filtering (AF.)

Resident Evil 5

In Resident Evil 5 the HD5970 beat everything except two 5870 AIBs which again is due to the differences in clock speed. However, the scaling from one (higher clock) HD5870 to the HD 5970 isn’t as great in Resident Evil 5 as S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and only averages 34.5%.

Figure 5: ATI Radeon HD5970 dual GPU AIB Resident Evil 5 benchmark results and comparisons. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)

Resident Evil 5 is a very fast playing game, like Left Behind, and so frame rate is pretty important. It has some interesting graphics, if a bit disturbing at times, so keeping all the graphics functions amped up is justified.

Vantage

Vantage remains the base line benchmark, and the HD 5970 did well in it as expected, showing an average scaling of just 15.2%, the lowest for all the tests.

Figure 6: ATI Radeon HD5970 dual GPU AIB Vantage benchmark results and comparisons. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)

The ATI Radeon HD 5970 is expected to sell for $599, it can be found on the web from $699.99 (which is an indication of the scarcity of the board (due probably to TSMCs difficulties with yield at 40nm.) to as low as $519.99.

What do we think?

If you’re shopping for your holiday present, or a present for your favorite geek, then the HD 5970 is the best choice you could make right now. And with over-clocking capabilities it’s even a more fun toy to play with.

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