Widescreen Gaming Forum

Hi all,

When I built my machine in July of 2010 I got a Radeon HD 5870. Since I have acquired three monitors capable of 1920 x 1200 and have really enjoyed the Eyefinity Experience over the past year.

But now I am running into some games I cannot get to playable FPS even with a lot of tweaking. Crysis 2, Witcher 2, and Alan Wake all come to mind.

So I am considering upgrading the graphics card to get another two years out of this PC. But I saw on the Tom's Hardware article of best cards for the money that the HD 5870 is still highly rated, only a few slots down from the latest cards.

What are my best options? Is it worthwhile to spend $400 on a new card now or should I wait for another generation to make the upgrade worthwhile? Would I have a significantly improved experience?

Thanks for any input that you have.
Fodder.

I used to run a pair of 5870 E6 2gb cards in cfx, I then upgraded to a single 7970 which has performed faster than them combined and is less flaky than using cfx.
So for me the 7970 was a good upgrade and has given my pc also build in 2010 new life.

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| Gigabyte X79S-UP5-WiFi Skt2011 | i7 4820k @4.4GHz Watercooled (Ivy Bridge-E) | Corsair Vengence 32GB @2133MHz 11-11-11-27 2T Quad-Channel (8x4GB) | AMD R9-Fury-X 4GB @1140/505MHz + EKWB Watercooled | 256GB Crucial MX200 SSD | 8x 1TB Samsung F3 SATA-II | Corsair 850W TX PSU | 3x Dell S2209W 22"wide TFT's (5760x1080res) | Logitech Z-5400 5.1ch speakers | Win7 Ultimate x64 |

Thank you for the reply. This is what I was looking for!

If I could ask, what kind of game play experience does the 7970 give you? I am curious for different games like Crysis 2 or Witcher 2, what kind of FPS does it give under eyefinity resolutions (like 5760 x 1200) and do you still need to turn down and tweak a lot of graphics settings?

And if anyone knows does the 7950 work as well for eyefinity? On some message boards everyone advises to go with the 7950 since they are about the same, but those boards don't really take into account eyefinity setups and such.

Thanks again to the community here.

AMD HD7970 or AMD HD7950 Review Skip did a lot of testing! You can find all Reviews under "Hardware" - "Reviews & Benchmarks"

i think your 5870 will performe a little worse than a HD6950

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We gonna send it to outa space!

I was running 2 - 5850 cards, played almost all games at decent FPS. average of about 40 FPS on most games, But then I started playing Far cry 3 and no mater what I did could not get better then about 15-20 fps even droping Rez down to 4800x900, game constantly crashing in DX11, 50% the time in DX9. The cards were starting to get to hot alot of the time in that game as well.

I just got my self a hd 7970 last week, I can say was a great upgrade. I now get in FC3 35-40 FPS in eyefinity 5760x1080 every thing on full, sweetfx on and and running in DX11, game has not crashed since. in Planetside 2, was getting 20-30 FPS in heavy battles, now getting 50 FPS. AMD though has an Optimize out for Crossfire that on my 5850's boosted FPS by 40% so I may get more if I was still running crossfire. A friend of mine over holidays picked up 2 - 7870's and is now getting 80-90 FPS in PS2 in heavy battles.

So it would be worth it, in my mind now. I was leary at first as it was ok on most new games, bearable FPS. But now I feel it was a good move, as I can do alot more with my card and set for some time again

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Windows 7 x64 SP1
SABERTOOTH 990FX R1- AMD FX-8350 4.5 - Kingston Hyper X 16gb DDR3 1600
ATI R290 Eyefinity

Thanks to both Haldi and Diamond for their insights. Also thanks to SkipClarke for the work on the graphics card reviews.

This is great information.