HIS HD 5870 iCooler V Turbo 1GB
Apr 17th, 2010 | By JaredFirst out of the gate is the suite of 3DMark benchmarks, while a synthetic benchmark they are widely considered the standard for comparing video card and system performance. Synthetic benchmarks don’t necessarily translate to real world performance, but give us a good comparison between cards with a standard scoring system. First I ran 3DMark06 on stock settings and then moved on to 3DMark Vantage. I ran Vantage on the following presets at default settings; Entry, Performance and High.
There is a nice increase in scores from last generations HD 4890, where the gaps get wider the higher the settings are set. We don’t see a huge increase in scores with the card overclocked.
Next on the block is Furmark. Furmark is an OpenGL benchmark that renders a large ring of fur to stress and test the GPU. Here I ran at a resolution of 1920×1200 with 0 MSAA.
Here we see huge gains from the last generation but again just a small difference when the card is overclocked at just 3 FPS.
The final benchmark for this chapter is with Lightsmark 2008, a realtime global illumination and penumbra shadows enabled benchmark. Natural lighting makes artificial graphics life-like. Computers get faster, but rendering more polygons doesn’t add value if lighting looks faked, so insiders know that the next big thing is proper lighting aka Realtime Global Illumination. Typical workloads in realtime rendering will shift. Lightsmark simulates it. Global Illumination renders often take hours. Is your computer fast enough for realtime?
In the past ATI cards have sort of lagged behind with Lightsmark but as you can see results have increased by over 300%.
That concludes testing with the synthetic benchmarks, because quite honestly if you are buying this card it is most likely for real games.