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Soleron said:
WilliamWatts said:
The Radeon 4890 has high idle power consumption and load power consumption. Its also far less efficient at the latest Direct X 11 games. I've seen upwards of 20% improvement over the DX10 path for certain games.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3658&p=7

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,700050/Dirt-2-benchmarks-DX-9-vs-DX-11-Update-Radeon-HD-5970-results/Practice/.

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/screenshots/original/2009/11/Stalker-CoP-DX10-vs-DX11.png

That's all three DX11 games. First one has the cards about where I would expect from non-DX11 games, second has a large drop for DX11 and third a large rise. I wouldn't call that a win. Games developed entirely with DX11 from the start may well show a clear lead but there's few DX10-designed games 4 years after its release so it doesn't really matter.

The 4850 and 4890 offer better price/performance than 5750/5770. Conversely, the 5-series have much lower power consumption as you say. So choose which one of those you care most about.

Im talking performance/watt for both idle and load conditions combined with performance. You can very well pay for less performance outright but still pay less overall for that performance with the 5770 because its got significantly lower idle and load power useage. In addition to this you can get away with a much cheaper PSU at the same time. Factoring everything in the 5770 is cheaper for the performance to run and its cheaper to build a system around that card. For a system which is just being upgraded it may be a different story however.

Im not saying that you're incorrect but that theres a bigger story to be told than outright performance for the dollar spent.

In addition to this the current DX11 hardware still has performance improvements from drivers to be expected whereas the older has been pretty much tapped for all easy gains. Furthermore developers have the option of either increasing image quality or performance when they implement DX11, this is something that older hardware can never take advantage of.