ATI Radeon HD 5870 Review

How did it make "little sense"? Everything NVIDIA has now is a rehash of a prior product. In fact, the G92 has been re-used so many times they should probably get an award for it or something.

There have been no new gaming cards since the GTX 280. Everything that has come after is a minor tweak on either that core or the G92 core. The HD 5800 series is a completely new architecture in contrast.

I was referring to NVIDIA's Vista drivers, as I mentioned clearly. Also, I currently use an NVIDIA card currently, so I have no idea about any current ATI driver issues (I did own a 4870X2 for some time). And frankly, I don't see a big deal in the grey screen issue, since it doesn't affect every card out there.

Why does the 40nm yield issue make it more compelling?
The issue is not with TSMC, it's with the new silicon architecture ,the die size and leakage. Or do you think nVidia couldn't figure out that a (much) larger die size will result in fewer dies per wafer as opposed to ATI's silicon?

Ancient history. That has to do with the HD 5870 in what way ?

Hellloooooo...You think Catalyst 10.1 gave any performance tweaks to HD4xxx and HD3xxx cards

R9800->X800->X1900->HD2900/X2K
and...
http://www.guru3d.com/news/ati-rebrands-11-radeon-hd-3000-cards-to-4000-series/

Fail.
The HD 5xxx series is an incremental advance over the previous series line that add's a dedicated tesselator and double the shaders (in simplistic terms). If the HD5xxx series is so advanced why is the next 28nm Northern Islands GPU line touted as having a GPGPU structure more in line with the parallel computing of CUDA ?

So the issue has to affect every card before you find it a big deal. Why bother being on the forum as any issue raised here doesn't affect every person.
All I can say is don't try to get into customer relations or PR.

And before you start sulking....I own both nVidia and ATI rigs.
I recommend to others and base my own buying on the here-and-now. Check my posts if you find that hard to believe.

GT300 yields were under 2% in September last year. Yields have improved since then, but NVIDIA still hasn't figured out a way to stay in the game like AMD has done with the 5800 series.

The driver comment was directed at him, not you.

As I said, I don't own an ATI card anymore, and now that I do have an NVIDIA card, there are games that have issues with my current card, which NVIDIA has not bothered to fix. My friends who have a 4670 and 3870 do not suffer the same issues. An example that comes to mind is Mass Effect; I keep getting a GPF error at random points in the game, and neither friend has any issue. We have the same mobo and CPU too, so it can only be the card IMO.

As for rebranding, why rebrand the same card not once (which is understandable) but twice? They perform exactly the same. And these are gaming cards, not entry-level cards, like the ones in your link.

The HD 5xxx comment was FAIL yes. I confess I didn't do any research before blurting that out.

How is that related to the forum?! People here come with issues, and they usually come here after exhausting other avenues (usually, but not always). You're telling me they wouldn't bother Googling their problem first and take the time to make an account here and ask for help? Other members also usually suggest the ones who do come here directly to try searching the forums before continuing with their new thread.

And with that, I'm off to sleep. Have a good one, mate.

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No, that was some creative mathematics that were endorsed by such illuminaries as Charlie "nVidia scorned me" Demerjian

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I was under the impression that it's a PhysX conflict with the game and that nVidia owners were advised to go to their nVidia Control Panel > PhysX tab > Disable PyhsX support.
A bit of a pain to have to disable/enable the PhysX manually each time you play a different game maybe but not insurmountable. Is this not the case?

Rebranding is rebranding. Once , twice, ten times- what does it matter?
I also mentioned the R9800->X800->X1900->HD2900/X2K rebranding. These were ATI's flagship SKU's in 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007 respectively

My point is that just because only a small percentage of owners are affected by the grey screen issue (BTW I've RMA'ed an HD5850 for that reason) doesn't make it any less frustrating for the people concerned. The moment you start writing off those users you marginalize their problem. An analogy would be (seemingly) 8800GTS 512Mb owners who have ME GPF issues....you get my drift?

Both AMD and nVidia (and Intel, and MS etc...) see you and me as meat with money-certainly nothing more, and hopefully,nothing less.

nVidia have manufacturing and architectural and performance issues, and so does ATI. Here's France Hardware's analysis on documented failure rates.
Not to mention such own-goals as the HD2900 XT and FX 5800 Ultra.

Return rate vs Failure rate

Thanks for the link Chef, very interesting read indeed. I noted a few things however that made it (I think) almost impossible to parse it into meaningful or usable information. for the following reasons. 1) I noticed that this information was from a online retailer and not a supplier that is selling to professionals. At least not wholesaling to established system builders. 2) it is a return rate....not a failure rate that the author first asserts. 3) I, like you, build systems for others for a living, and have taken to purchasing 'open box' or 'returned' items that are the returned parts of this study, and have yet to receive a component that I had to return because it was a failed or defective part. The thing that kept running through my mind whilst reading this is that this is France's version of say Newegg, and all of the preposterous reviews of components on that site, you know, where they returned the PSU because they took it out of the box and plugged it in to the wall,and were stymied as to why it didn't start up. I have found over the years that a vast majority of these returns are user error. What do you think?

Fair comment I think.
The retailer is France's version of Newegg/Tiger Direct and as such I think some of the returns are probably user error or that the retail boxes were missing parts.
Motherboard returns most likely include incompatibility with other parts, warped PCB's, heavy handed first-timers, and for motherboards with push-pin heatsink attachment...a lack of push-pins.
PSU's and video cards I think would tend more failure after prolonged use rather than defective out of the box, and as such are likely to fail due to the predations of overzealous overclockers. Having said that I think that those failures are probably across the board regardless of manufacturer if the part can be considered a "gamer" card.
I have seen quite a few instances of failures in GTX280's and HD 4870's in reference form. From personal experience those that aren't killed by brutal overclocking seem to probably die from heat related causes. I say probably because both parts are thermally rated higher than I've ever seen one of these cards reach, but failures are probably 10:1 in favour of cards that have reference coolers/shrouds and stock clocks.
I have seen a site somewhere that had correlated returns from major manufacturers based upon warranty claims only, gathered in part from annual stock keeping, stock movement and refurbishment sales numbers present in manufacturers annual fiscal reports but have been unable to find it. Thought I'd bookmarked the site but no. I will continue looking as it now bugs me, but thought I'd link the France Hardware site to show that parts failure is not limited to one particular supplier.
I think some of the France Hardware figures are indicative of the underlying problems although I'd be skeptical of the numbers given....unless they are dealing with such manufacturing abominations as the P5N-T Deluxe, although a 16+% failure rate seems quite good -I'd suspect that the rate will be closer to 100% given that all (if not most) of the surviving boards are unstable and being replaced in turn with the same unstable RMA's. Once this model passes out of warranty I think a working model might be a collectors item.

The HD 4870 (and most of the HD 48xx series) I believe is probably more susceptible to this owing to the low stock fan speeds.

Value? 5850 vs 5870

The HD 5850 is a much better value in my opinion. Granted, its performance is lower than the 5870, but if you want the best value for you money, a 5850 is the way to go. As far as performance, Only the most demanding of games will show a true difference between the cards, if you simply are comparing the appearance of the game. Techspot's benchmarks of the 5850 show it performing only 14% slower than the 5870 while playing Crysis Warhead (2560x1600, 0xAA/0xAF) which was only around 5-6 fps lower. This is not very noticeable unless one plays very close attention to detail.

Shut up u nvidia fanboys

Touche.