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Sapphire Radeon HD 5670 1GB video card review - Conclusions |
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Written by Hanners
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Thursday, 14 January 2010 00:00 |
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Page 11 of 11
Conclusions
After bringing DirectX 11 support to both enthusiast and mainstream gamers in an impressively timely fashion last year, there's no sign of any let-up from AMD as we enter 2010 - With two million DirectX 11 GPUs already shipped it certainly appears that they have a significant leg-up over NVIDIA in the market this generation, and the introduction of sub-$100 DirectX 11 hardware will surely only increase this gap, particularly given the rumours that NVIDIA will continue to rely upon DirectX 10/10.1 hardware outside of the high-end for quite some time to come.
Kudos then goes to AMD for reaching out and bringing the latest API and functionality such as Eyefinity to ever-lower price points - This is undoubtedly an important part of establishing DirectX 11 as a tantalising development platform on the PC, but of course from a consumer perspective it raises the question of whether the Radeon HD 5670 is a worthy purchase at the prices that it represents.
If you're running a monitor with a native resolution of 1680x1050 (which is probably pretty common at the kind of price levels we're talking about for these cards), then the Radeon HD 5670 certainly holds a certain amount of promise for the more casual gamers amongst you - From our testing it has proved itself capable of handling most titles with all of their graphical settings cranked up provided you're happy to live without anti-aliasing, which frequently proves to be beyond its reach without reducing graphics quality elsewhere. If that's good enough for your needs, then between £70 and £90 in the UK (for the 512MB and 1GB variants respectively) could prove to be a real bargain, especially given that it brings other benefits such as top-notch Blu-Ray playback, HDMI video output and Eyefinity support (if the idea of running three monitors floats your boat).
Having said that, if you're looking at the Radeon HD 5670 so that you can enjoy new DirectX 11 titles such as S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and DiRT 2 with all the trimmings, then prepare to be disappointed - Yes, this GPU can handle DirectX 11 content just as you would expect, but at that 1680x1050 target resolution at which our gaze has been focused it fails to do so at what can truly be called acceptable frame rates even without anti-aliasing in play. It often isn't that far off posting up playable performance, but unless you can tolerate sub-thirty frames per second frame rates then you'll end up turning down image quality levels or dialling down the resolution, which rather defeats the point of many of the benefits of DirectX 11 in the first place. If enjoying the fruits of Microsoft's latest gaming API is your priority, then I'd really suggest saving up and shelling out an extra £20 or so for a Radeon HD 5750, which has more horsepower to spare when it comes to the latest titles and is also better equipped to offer up anti-aliasing at 1680x1050 in the majority of scenarios, making it well worth the extra outlay in my book.
Overall though, another successful product launch from AMD means that if the thought of spending more than £100 on a new graphics card leaves you cold, then the Sapphire Radeon HD 5670 is great value for what it offers - As long as you don't become too enamoured of the card's DirectX 11 capabilities or demand anti-aliasing from it in all the latest games, then chances are you'll be a satisfied customer. If you can't live without those features though, then saving up a little extra cash for a higher specified part will make a world of difference.
Product information
Sapphire Radeon HD 5670 1GB
- Vendor web site
- Vendor product information
Retail pricing and availability (at time of going to press): £89.99 including VAT
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Product name
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Sapphire Radeon HD 5670
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Core chipset
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"Redwood"
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Stream Processors
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400 Stream Processors
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DirectX / DirectCompute level
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DirectX 11 / DirectCompute 11
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Core clock speed
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775 MHz
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Frame buffer size
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1 GB
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Memory bus width
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128-bit
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Memory clock speed
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1000 MHz (GDDR5)
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Many thanks to Sapphire for providing the sample for this review
If you have any comments or thoughts on this review, please feel free to leave them in our forum.
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