Man something is really wrong with you with over one year release ahead of
GTX 580 and the accompanying driver upgrades the ATi card has manged a bare minimum
10fps lead over the Nvidia card
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 Review - Page 15
+Overclocking the HD 5970 is a no-brainer cause it quickly reaches a fold where the temperature increase render the gains of the operation wholly unsatisfactory and I don't think a
GTX 580 SLi setup can be taken down with a
ATi HD 6870 CROSSFIRE setup
ATI Radeon HD 5970 2GB: The World's Fastest Graphics Card : Introduction
AMD ATI Radeon HD 5970 review - Graphic reviews - TrustedReviews
Review - AMD ATI Radeon HD 5970 Review | bit-tech.net
Conclusion
The Radeon HD 5970 has a huge amount of potential (as the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. testing showed) but, more often than not, we found that the card failed to fulfil all of that potential. On paper, it's undoubtedly the meanest and highest performing graphics card on the planet, but the reality is quite different. With most retailers asking for more than £500, and with supply so low, we wonder why ATI bothered to release this card at this time. After all, it has the luxury of a DX11 monopoly at the moment, and a few more weeks of driver dev time wouldn't have gone amiss.
ATI's Eyefinity and the possibilities it opens up for multi-screen gaming might give it some edge. Even on a 30in screen with a load of AA, the HD 5970 fails to comprehensively distinguish itself from the current high-end cards, but possibly it will do great things when asked to power three 24in panels. There were number of occasions where we bumped into a CPU limitation on a single screen (even a 30in one), so Eyefinity should help to give the HD 5970 more purpose.
With that said, there are still some outstanding issues with the Radeon HD 5970, without testing Eyefinity, and most of them revolve around software. The HD 5970 failed to unlock anything like its full potential in four out of five of our test games, with the low minimums and high averages in Call of Duty: World at War and Dawn of War II strongly indicating that ATI needs to spend more time refining the driver for the HD 5970. While the monthly Catalyst updates do tend to bring new features and updates, there's no guarantee that a new driver will fix your favourite game, or that it won't lower performance in favour of a fix for another game.
Overall, we're very impressed with the Radeon HD 5970's S.T.A.L.K.E.R. performance, which we take to be example of just how fast the HD 5970 can be. However, we have to judge the card on its performance in all our test games, and it just doesn't stand up to that scrutiny. As such, we wouldn't buy a Radeon HD 5970 card at the moment, even if we could afford it, fit its 11.5in 12.2in length in our case, and find one in stock.
