2 full pages of whining and crying and ZERO talk about how the 5870 handles fsx. The 4850 was HARRIBLE for fsx. At the thought of a cloud the card would choke up 50% of its framerate. In clear weather it was fine. The 4850 was in no way even close to the gtx285 in terms of smoothness or frame rate, especially when weather is present. Anyone that says there was no problem with clouds on the 4800 series is either a noob or a liar. Now, how does the 5870 handle weather in fsx compared to the 4800 series cards?

I'm no lier and have had NO problems with clouds with my 4890 ... so its not all 4xxxx cards.I previously had a 8800GTX and found I get better frame rates and smoother perofrmance with the 4890previous to the 8800GTX I had a 3870x2 - that did have the clouds problem

There is no info on GT300. Anything you read about it is FUD.

Well. Goes official on the information. Seems that "leaked" data was pretty solid after all.The nVIDIA Fermi White Papers published at HardOCP seem to support the information. Read more here: http://www.hardocp.com/article/2009/09/30/...e_white_paper/1and herehttp://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3651

Wow all that reading.. and no guarantees as far as gaming performance goes not even a mention on core speeds, just that they're a few steps closer into Intels CISC business. Oh well looks like I won't be upgrading to the 300 series after all. Though I do like they're market break down... just shows why they aren't even concentrating on gaming these days.

Wow all that reading.. and no guarantees as far as gaming performance goes not even a mention on core speeds, just that they're a few steps closer into Intels CISC business. Oh well looks like I won't be upgrading to the 300 series after all. Though I do like they're market break down... just shows why they aren't even concentrating on gaming these days.

Just installed a new Sapphire 5870. In FSX is as good (or bad) as the GTX 285. The problem IMO is FSX. There

You left out what type of cables you use.

So you don

Thank you Miquel that is great to know. I will probably be upgrading to the eyefinity6 when it comes out if it is similarly priced to the 3 monitor version and if gt300 is not out or more of its capabilities leaked to the mainstream. The 4850 was just plain awful in fsx. I would get terrible jerks and stuttering when there was any weather on screen, specifically clouds. The 8800 and the gtx285 are both fantastic cards for fsx.I get a super smooth framerate with my core i7 system now. Even with ut2 traffic set at 70% at FSDT's O'hare I am pulling 20-30fps with over 50 heavies easily on screen. LAX and JFK are about the only American airports that get me into the teens now. If the ut2 devs would find a way to run their program on a separate core from fsx then that would be the holy grail for performance for me, assuming that is even possible with how poorly fsx was coded.

You left out what type of cables you use.

Not just the cables, the case fans and the displays also, maybe I should add those too.

Wow all that reading.. and no guarantees as far as gaming performance goes not even a mention on core speeds, just that they're a few steps closer into Intels CISC business. Oh well looks like I won't be upgrading to the 300 series after all. Though I do like they're market break down... just shows why they aren't even concentrating on gaming these days.

Hmm...this made me sure to wait for the GTX300 card. Must be a killer card for FSX and superior to the AMD Radeon 5870 due to the wider memory bus and GDDR5 memory. Thanks 'AVN8tr' :(

Hmm...this made me sure to wait for the GTX300 card. Must be a killer card for FSX and superior to the AMD Radeon 5870 due to the wider memory bus and GDDR5 memory. Thanks 'AVN8tr' :(

seriously - does the clouds issue really apply for the 4890 in FSX ?I tried all sorts of combos of complex clouds, quantity of 3d clouds, overcast skies etc - and couldn'g et the frame rate to plummetso what makes the frame rate half ? I've tried looking for it and didn't succeed in finding it

Maybe the issue only exists when you run REX and a silly amount of AF, who knows, or use silly tweaks. I've seen plenty of youtube videos where clouds don't even seem to be a problem at all. From what I've seen some of the best videos are all done with ATI cards. As long as they've cleaned up their act when it comes to manufacturing I'm willing to give them another go. Also if it's really clouds that seem to be a problem, I know that a few of the external views in FS are just plain buggy to begin with, especially the spot/chase views where the physics and video frames are just out of sync altogether.

Maybe the issue only exists when you run REX and a silly amount of AF, who knows, or use silly tweaks. I've seen plenty of youtube videos where clouds don't even seem to be a problem at all. From what I've seen some of the best videos are all done with ATI cards. As long as they've cleaned up their act when it comes to manufacturing I'm willing to give them another go. Also if it's really clouds that seem to be a problem, I know that a few of the external views in FS are just plain buggy to begin with, especially the spot/chase views where the physics and video frames are just out of sync altogether.

Silly amount of AF? AF is basically free on high-end hardware from both IHVs and has been for several generations now. Cleaned up their act WRT manufacturing? Where do you get this crap? ATi uses the same foundry to manufacture their GPUs as NV does, TSMC.

free.. really I thought AF had a complexity of O(n^2)... oh well could you please publish a paper on this miraculous discovery of yours!

free.. really I thought AF had a complexity of O(n^2)... oh well could you please publish a paper on this miraculous discovery of yours!

When your texture filtering units have so little work to do already and you have excess bandwidth (as is the case with every high end graphics card for the last several generations, hence my statement of such), yeah, it basically is free. The benefit of having dedicated texture units. Read a review or two and you'll see this. Even Intel took this route with Larrabee. I did not make a blanket statement about AF being free, I gave you a condition in which it is "basically free". Context.

If you read the AnandTech review you'll find out that the tested 5870 card only supports 3 output devices, not 6. So max three monitors is what you get for now. But you with that massive resolution in FSX you'll sacrifice a lot of fps. I would prefer to use my single monitor at 1920x1200 and being able to run FSX with bloom enabled, max autogen, highest water settings, clouds all over and a lot of AI.

Bloom is poorly implemented in FSX. It causes a large performance hit, basically shuts down FSAA, and does pretty much nothing over the ENB Series Plugin.Get the plug-in and you get bloom with little to no performance hit....and you can still run FSAA at whatever level you want. All you really need to do is try different settings in the Plug-in's config file to get the look you want. Worth checking out. :)

I've got to ask as I'm considering replacing my 4870x2 with either the GTX 285 or this new one from ATI... what are the exact framerate improvements that you see for both FS9 and FSX? I'm currently getting 9-18 fps in a busy area with moderate traffic and some clouds in FSX and 15-25 fps with a complex area, max traffic, and decent cloud coverage in FS9.With selling the 4870x2, I can expect the difference to cost me about $150-$200 for either card, so I'm really only going to do it if I can get snot smooth graphics in all conditions in FS9 and at the very least get a smooth 20-30 fps in FSX. Can you tell me if these circumstances are there?Thanks,Greg