The card installed with no problem, the drivers (currently special drivers as the current general Cat. release doesn't support the card right now) installed fine and everything is as fast and responsive as you'd expect.
Gaming wise, well the review sites pretty much cover it.
My currently most played game is TF2 so, after a windows reinstall due to a slight SSD firmware issue, I ran the game up, turned everything to max with a screen size of 1920*1200 and was pleased to see a solid 60fps regardless of what was going on (with Vsync off it maxes out around 120fps, with a low point of around 90fps).
I managed to get onto Aion for a while, which is a CryEngine powered game although not quite as hard on the hardware as Crysis, maxed that out and also got between 120 and 60fps depending on what was being displayed.
Based on the hardware reviews I think my setup, with 2 1920*1200 screens, is probably around the sweet spot. Above 1920*1200 the GPU seems to suffer due to its 256bit bus, however given there aren't many people gaming above that level AMD probably took the right path.
Software wise, I've just noticed AMD's Hydravision which gives you;
- the ability to send windows to different monitors
- the ability to fullscreen a window across multple monitors
- multiple desktops (like X11 and OSX)
- a grid setup which allows you to edit a grid on your monitors, attach a window to this grid and have them snap into predefined locations at predefined sizes.
So far I've enabled the first 2 and the last option, at some point I might try the multiple desktops just to see if it really is the big deal some linux and OSX users make it out to be.
Of course, none of the above mentioned D3D11 which is the big thing from this card.
I think, of all the new features, the most striking is the new tesselation stage.
This is highlighted nicely by the sample in the DX11 SDK.
First up we have some stones, here is the bump mapped version;
This can be improved with some Parallax Occusion Mapping
Which is better and what we are used to seeing these days, however they still still don't have a definate silhouette to the image which can be seen around the edges.
So, lets introduce the tesselation;
And suddenly the stones look that much more real.
A few tweaks to the parameters reduces the processing costs at the cost of very little performance.
The finally setting looks better than the Parallax Occlsion Mapping at a lower cost.
Finally some things you can't do with either of the other two methods;
(Note the difference around the bottom of the objects between the 2nd and 3rd images here where the parallax mapping gets it slightly wrong).
This, for me, is the most striking example of what D3D11 can do for games and the visual quality going forward.
My only disappointment was the order independant transparancy example which, for some reason, only gets single digit fps right now. I plan to look into this to see why it is the case as it could be a driver issue or even a case of accidently ending up on a software path.
So, would I recommend the HD5870 to people?
Hell yes!
The only reasons you might not want one are;
- you have a dual GPU card from the last generation, in which case unless you really want D3D11 support you card will be slightly faster
- you are waiting and hoping that NV can come up with something better at a decent price
- you need NV's OpenGL and/or PerfHUD debugging tools.
AMD do have a shader/graphics debugging tool however I'm currently not sure on its DX11 state and I haven't had a chance to try it. However it's not a PerfHUD type tool, it looks more like a Pix type setup, although one of the more intresting things about it is that client-server setup which means I could do my devwork on my desktop but capture and debug on my laptop.
With my plan to do some DX11 stuff in the near future (well, not just DX11, I want to do something to really make my i7 and HD5 cry) I might well be looking into this tool and when I do I'll give you some details about it.
Might just hold off to see if I can get any Cyber Monday deals too