The AMD HD5870 - the fastest single-GPU card available?

Benchmarks

So how does it perform? To test this we put together two systems.

System 1:
CPU: AMD Phenom II 955
Memory: 4 GB Corsair 1333MHz DDR3
Motherboard: ASUSM4A7BT-E
Main disk: Corsair P128 SSD
Other harddrive: 36 GB Raptor
Optical drive: LG BR-player

System 2:
CPU: Intel Corei7 940
Memory: 6 GB Corsair 1333MHz DDR3
Motherboard: Intel DX58SO
Main Disk: Samsung F2 EcoGreen 1 TB
Optical: External ASUS BR-drive (USB)

Both systems had Windows 7 RTM installed with all the latest patches. Due to lack of time we simply had no time to install Vista on both also but we hope to come back to some Vista testing at a later date.

The drivers used were Catalyst 9.9 for all AMD cards except the HD5870, a beta driver for the HD5870 and n… 190.62 for the NVIDIA cards.

Crysis v. 1.21

Crysis is the most highly anticipated game to hit the market in the last several years. Crysis is based on the CryENGINE™ 2 developed by Crytek. The CryENGINE™ 2 offers real time editing, bump mapping, dynamic lights, network system, integrated physics system, shaders, shadows, and a dynamic music system, just to name a few of the state-of-the-art features that are incorporated into Crysis. As one might expect with this number of features, the game is extremely demanding of system resources, especially the GPU. We expect Crysis to be a primary gaming benchmark for many years to come.

As we move up in the resolutions the HD5870 closes in to the GTX295 and almost reaches it. It leaves all the other cards way behind.

The situation changes a bit when we use our Intel test-system as the HD5870 now performs almost as well as the GTX295 right away.