Sapphire Radeon HD 5570 – Turning the HTPC into a viable gaming device?
One of the key elements that has always drawn me towards the HTPC as a concept has been that of convergence and simplification; reducing the complexity of the typical Home Theatre set up without sacrificing on functionality nor (ideally) quality.
But if a selection of boxes underneath your TV can do the job then what’s the problem? Well, put simply how often do you get a confused spouse, child, or other loved one asking you to help them do something as simple as watch a DVD?
Between the inputs on a TV, the receiver for the sound, Freeview DVR, Sky+, Blu-ray player, switches and remotes you can end up with a bewildering array of settings that the uninitiated find unfathomable. Many shy away, those that dare do so in fear of causing irreparable damage.
For this reason my lounge’s TV stand contains nothing more than a TV, an audio receiver and my Windows 7 Media Center system…. Oh and an XBox 360, of course.
You see while the PC has generally been able to offer console beating capabilities thanks to its extra processing muscle, little consideration has been paid to the HTPC market. Sure, we’ve had a range of low-end cards with video decoding features, but these days the integrated graphics can do that job just as well with lower power consumption. When it comes to cards capable of acceptable gaming performance it’s been rare to find them in the half height form factor commonly used in HTPC systems. Those that were generally did so at the expense of acoustics along with a price premium over the standard models.
Really, a dedicated games console made sense.
Enter the 5-series
ATI have had some ups and downs over the last few years, but the launch of the Radeon HD 5870 last September marked a return to form for the company, beating NVIDIA to the DirectX 11 punch while offering top notch performance in existing titles. Not only that but ATI managed to spread the 5-series goodness across their product range in double quick time; less than 6 months.
Of these cards the one that caught our eye was the Radeon HD 5570.
When most people look at the Radeon HD 5000 cards they seem to gauge them as a fraction of the Radeon HD 5870, with its 1600 shaders, 80 TMUs (Texture Memory Units), 32 ROPs (Render Output units) and 256-bit of GDDR5.
| Model | Die Size | Core Speed | Effective Memory Speed | Shaders | TMUs | ROPS | Memory Bus Width | Memory Type |
| Radeon HD 5870 | 334mm | 850MHz | 4800 MT/s | 1600 | 80 | 32 | 256 bits | GDDR5 |
| Radeon HD 5570 | 110mm | 650MHz | 1800 MT/s | 400 | 20 | 8 | 128 bits | GDDR3 |
| 33% | 76% | 38% | 25% | 25% | 25% | 50% |
In terms of physical units the 5570 is roughly 1/4 of the 5870.
| Model | Pixel Fillrate | Texture Fillrate | Memory Bandwidth | Shader Throughput |
| Radeon HD 5870 | 27.2 GP/s | 68 GT/s | 153.6 GB/s | 2720 GFLOPS |
| Radeon HD 5570 | 5.2 GP/s | 13 GT/s | 28.2 GB/s | 520 GFLOPS |
| 19% | 19% | 18% | 19% |
But when you consider the lower clockspeeds the theoretical performance comes in around 1/5th of the 5870′s. The 5870 isn’t the 5570′s competition though, as it has to compete with the XBox 360′s Xenos and Playstation 3′s Reality Synthesizer GPUs.
| Model | Pixel Fillrate | Texture Fillrate | Memory Bandwidth | Shader Throughput |
| Radeon HD 5570 | 5.2 GP/s | 13 GT/s | 28.2 GB/s | 520 GFLOPS |
| Xenos (360) | 4 GP/s | 8 GT/s | 22.4 GB/s (Shared) | 48 GFLOPS |
| Reality Synthesizer (PS3) | 4.4 GP/s | 13.2 GT/s | 22.4 GB/s | Non-unified shaders |
Up against the consoles the Radeon HD 5570 starts to look a little more competitive, with similar levels of pixel and texture performance along with a reasonable increase in memory bandwidth and more than a 10x increase in shader performance compared to the XBox 360′s Xenos GPU.
ATI also do another, even lower end card which is purely passive; the Radeon HD 5450. Really though this card offers little more than integrated graphics. Performance is higher, but not enough to offer console levels of quality, and it lacks some of the HD video quality options of the 5570.
Our challenger
So on to the card itself, the Sapphire Radeon HD 5570.
Being a low-end card you won’t find a lot of extras, but what you do get is a couple of low profile brackets, allowing the card to be securely fitted to a low profile HTPC system.
The card itself is based off ATI’s reference design PCB, but with Sapphire’s own custom cooler. We chose the Sapphire as this cooler is reputed to be quieter than the reference ATI cooler - ideal for HTPC usage.
Looking at the rear of the card we find 4 GDDR3 chips, which along with the 4 on the front make up a total of 1GB. Really this is overkill and a 512MB card would have sufficed, but bigger numbers sell cards and we couldn’t find any 512MB parts for sale.
Our card features DisplayPort and DVI, along with a D-Sub connector on the full height bracket or a secondary half height bracket connected through the ribbon cable. We chose to remove it however. Sapphire also do a version of the card with HDMI instead of DisplayPort, but for future proofing we went for the DisplayPort card.
In testing we used a DVI to HDMI adaptor, which functioned as you’d expect, transmitting both audio and video. There was some overscan on the picture, but this was easily trimmed out using the Catalyst Control Center.
ATI’s AVIVO video decoding seemed to work correctly with both Blu-ray playback in Arcsoft Total Media Theatre 3 and various files in Windows Media Center playing as expected with low CPU utilisation.
In use the card was extremely quiet; my HTPC is not silent, with a pair of 80mm fans in the PSU that also cool the CPU, but it’s by no means loud either. The Sapphire Radeon HD 5570 was inaudible in this system, even under load. If you are extremely sensitive to noise then you may want to wait for a passive card to hit the market, but compared to an XBox 360 the noise levels are extremely low.
Performance
For performance testing we are using a combination of quantitive and qualitative performance analysis, with average framerates used where a repeatable workload is available and reviewer opinion in titles where it isn’t. The titles chosen are all available both on the PC and at least one of the major consoles.
Our test system was as follows:
Intel Core i5-661 (dual-core, 3.33GHz, 4MB L3)
ASRock H55M
4GB DDR3-1333
320GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10
Sapphire Radeon HD 5570 1GB
Burnout Paradise
Criterion Games chaotic open-world racing game is a stunning example of a console to PC port done right, able to run brilliantly on a wide range of hardware.
We ran Burnout Paradise at 1920x1080 (1080p) with the detail turned up to High, but no anti-aliasing enabled, and as the FRAPS counter in the corner of the video shows in regular gameplay the Radeon HD 5570 manages to stay on, or at least very near, the 60fps mark. One area where the game did see some frame rate fluctuation was in the slow motion crash sequences, but still looked fluid and as these sections are not interactive they didn’t have any negative effect on gameplay.
Overall a great start for the Radeon HD 5570, but one which is assisted by a PC programming tour de force.
Colin McRae Dirt 2
Another racing game, this time Codemasters’ recent rally title. ATI worked with Codemasters to implement some high-end DirectX 11 effects including tesselation and cloth physics, but these are really aimed more at the high-end DX11 cards like the 5850 and above. Instead we ran the game’s built-in benchmark at the High preset (DX11 features are enabled at ‘Ultra High’ detail) and various resolutions.
While there may be some who’d say there is no acceptable results here, with even 1280x720 with no anti-aliasing coming in well below the 60fps mark, it’s worth remembering that on the consoles this is a 30fps title which -- having played it on the XBox 360 -- does suffer from some frame rate drops at times.
With this in mind the results at 1280x720 with 4x AA can be considered more or less equal, both in terms of IQ and performance, to the XBox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of the game.
Devil May Cry 4
Devil May Cry 4 is the first of three Capcom games we’re looking at today. Capcom have been a surprisingly strong supporter of the PC recently.
We see very little hit in performance from enabling anti-aliasing at 1280x720 in Devil May Cry 4, while frame rates remain comfortably over 60fps at all times bar a few minor blips in Scene 4 with a very large number of AI characters on screen. 1920x1080 is playable, but doesn’t reach the 60fps bar that many will want from a fast action game such as this.
Overall a strong showing from the 5570.
Far Cry 2
A major first person shooter from last year, Far Cry 2 not only offered some stunning jungle landscapes but perhaps a little too much repetition as you searched for The Jackal.
Far Cry 2 proves a slightly less demanding title than Dirt 2, delivering close to the 30fps average mark at all our tested resolutions. Its performance at 1280x720 4x AA puts it on a par with the console versions, which run at 30fps with some fluctuation during intense scenes.
Resident Evil 5
Resident Evil 5 isn’t the first incarnation of the successful horror series to appear on the PC, but it’s the most recent title having been released for the PC in September 2009, 6 months after the console launch.
Console versions of Resident Evil 5 run at 30fps, so even at 1920x1080 the Radeon HD 5570 is still competitive. At 1280x720 with 4x AA you are easily getting a console experience.
Street Fighter IV
Beat-em ups aren’t something you see too often on the PC, so it’s lucky that we have one of the best -- the superb Street Fighter 4.
We seem to have hit on a slight driver bug here, with performance being cut in half to a constant 30fps enabling anti-aliasing at 1280x720. This means here the Radeon HD 5570 does lose out slightly to the consoles, which are able to maintain a constant 60fps at these settings. If you are willing to sacrifice a little image quality however 1280x720 delivers near perfect playability.
Conclusion
Our testing shows that the Radeon HD 5570 can fulfil its on paper potential to match current consoles in terms of performance. Of course this in itself is nothing new, high-end PC graphics performance has been well in excess of consoles for years, but it is the first time that the performance is available in a form factor and thermal envelope acceptable for the HTPC.
Of course performance is only one part of the equation, while the Sapphire Radeon HD 5570 can offer console levels of gaming performance the bigger question is can the Home Theatre PC be used as a gaming platform?
The problem is the fixed nature of the consoles make them a far simpler proposition for gamers, particularly those without the patience or technical knowledge PC gaming sometimes requires. In terms of usability, ease of configuration, online service integration and controls the consoles represent platforms that stay fixed for years and designed to allow the user to drop a disc in and start playing.
By contrast the PC has a near infinite combination of hardware, software, online services and control devices - the sheer level of choice that helped popularise the platform can at times be its downfall. You’ll also find yourself having to make careful choices in the games you choose to find ones that play well with your chosen controller choice -- in my case I’ve found the standard XBox 360 controller to be a good choice for game compatibility with many now featuring built in profiles for it, but many games expect a keyboard in places, even for basic tasks.
There are benefits of course, if you already have a quick HTPC capable of taking either half or full height graphics cards the Sapphire Radeon HD 5570 will give you gaming capabilities at a price far lower than the XBox 360 or PlayStation 3 along with typically lower priced games.
Ultimately now the HTPC can be used as a gaming system, but it really needs a committed user to make it work. The real saviour of such a concept would be if an online distribution service such as Steam or Games for Windows Live were to create their own extension of their online service to encompass a 10ft UI and provide certified compatible games, but in reality the market for such a service is probably too niche to be commercially viable.
We would very much like to hear your opinions on this piece and will be covering some games we find work well on HTPCs in future.
