In December 2009 we wrote quite a lot about the upcoming new Acer laptops from the famous Aspire 8942G desktop replacement series. Nowadays they are ready for sale and buyers will soon see them in shops worldwide, but we had a chance for a quick sneak peak at one of them and we managed to run a few benchmarks on it. Mostly related to the video card, as it is based on Core i7 820QM processor, which you already heard about a lot. The most interesting about those new notebooks from Acer is that they are the first to use the newest DirectX 11 mobile graphics card from ATI – Mobility Radeon HD5850.
You can check the specs of the new Mobility Radeon HD5000 family here and we won’t go into details about it, as there are only a couple of differences compared to the desktop cards from the same generation. Well, except for the fact the new mobile HD5850 has half of the stream processors of the HD58xx desktop cards and only has a 128-bit memory bus and 1 GB of DDR3 memory running at 1600 MHz (800 MHz DDR). Its core works at 625 MHz, while the 700 MHz is the speed reserved to the higher clocked and equipped with faster GDDR5 video memory, which should make up for the loss of bus width, but that is about to be seen.
As this is only a preview part of our 8942G article, we will jump to some of the benchmarks, starting with 3DMark06. Even today this Futuremark benchmark still serves as basic relative speed indicator for notebooks, as there is not much to gain with most of the features of those new graphics cards if you struggle to get a decent framerate anyway. 3DMark06′s SM 3.0 represents quite well the performance in huge variety of DX9 games (most console-ports) – not FPS-wise but in comparison of other similar graphics cards. The SM2.0 benchmark represents those old games that never seem to get boring, while the DirectX 10, 10.1 and now even 11 is represented by 3DMark Vantage (we. do. not. like. it. sorry.) and mostly – by game benchmarks. lets get back to the 3DMark result.
This is 3DMark06 benchmark at default screen resolution for lower end notebooks – 1280×768 pixels with default benchmarks, which easily allows to compare it to laptops with WXGA and HD WXGA resolutions
HD5850 performance is closer to that of a HD4670 DDR3 instead of those old monsters GTS 160M and HD4850, as you can see for yourself. That made us really wonder what is wrong, so we headed to the next common screen resolution – 1280×1024, again we ran the benchmark with default settings.
Again you can see the result didn’t change much and you can easily imagine how we gazed at those result screens, opening Catalyst Control center, checking twice the speeds with GPU-Z, etc. whle wondering what is wrong. Yet another test we made – 1280×760 at 4x Antialiasing and 8 level Anisotropic filtering turned on:
While the result was nice to be seen as there was only a little performance hit from going to higher resolution, it remained near the HD4670 results, although here we overclocked the HD4670 @ 485/1782 MHz (you can check this manual to how to do it with RT). But this is a 320SP graphics card with almost the same memory and it started to give us almost the same performance at that point! We decided against using 3DMark06 further and to run a S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky becnhmark, as one of those DX10+ benches around.
Clear Sky at 1920×1080 screen resolution with DirectX 10.1 enabled in Advanced tab and Enhanced Dynamic Lighting DX100 (defaults):
Again the results confired the HD5850 was running slow. Well, not slower than HD4670, or at least not before we tried the Resident Evil 5 variable benchmark (details on the screen, Motion Blur enabled, no AA or AF at all, default CCC quality):
Now that really made us laugh. We just don’t know how to comment it. As of now you probably started to accept the fact there is something wrong with that computer. There are a few things that are or could be wrong, so here is a list:
1. The CPU runs at low speed or is in power saving state. Just take a look at this result, no need to say more than that wasn’t the case…
2. Card was working at lower speeds – GPU-Z cannot report how many SPs it has, but as with many other Mobility Radeon cards it correctly reports their speeds – and they were 625 MHz core and 800 (1600) MHz memory. Nothing wrong here.
3. Driver was bad. We figured that, but there is no other driver than the one that Windows 7 has for it – a preinstalled Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit with God-knows-what-driver, and that’s all we have, as ATI are famous for they lack of Mobility Radeon support while Acer still have not released that notebook officially and Driverheaven Mobility Modder doesn’t know anything about HD5000 yet. We’ll stick to it and we won’t even reinstall the OS, as we will risk not having a driver at all after that. And we just started it anyway.
4. Memory speed sucks. It really does, actually, but that shouldn’t make the card as slow as HD4670, which only has over 2.5 times less stream processors and doesn’t run at much greater speeds, given it uses the same memory.
Conclusion
It is not that, we just wanted to start the paragraph like that… ATI Mobility Radeon HD5850 wasn’t ready to hit the market. There is certain problem with its performance, and its 128-bit memory bus, which differs it from the good old Mobility Radeon HD4850′s with its 256-bit memory, won’t allow it to shine even when it gets better drivers. We will continue to run benchmarks to and we will tr to change the driver “the other way”, but the whole hype about how good will be those new DX11 mobile cards looks lame right now. We just don’t have a clue why ATI released a card that will potentially run slower than its predecessor.
Oh, and here comes the fun part – the driver issue on a laptop that comes ready with Windows preinstalled is one thing, but buying a low-end Aspire with HD5650 that doesn’t have OS on it is completely another thing. May be it is time for ATI to start releasing drivers for the public, as we are really tired modding them with third party tools. Or just lack both drivers and tools as of now. Or at least let us see a text on the Mobility Radeon HD5800 page stating “THERE ARE NO DRIVERS YET”.
Dear, AMD/ATI – you get 10/10, as having the hardware alone won’t make us write drivers for it believe us. Too bad that the laptop itself was real joy to use.
Higher Twisted Rating is worse!
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Acer Aspire 5740G, 5942G, 7740G, 8942G ATI Mobility Radeon HD5650 and HD5850 drivers for Windows 7:
ATI Mobility Radeon HD5850 driver
ATI Mobility Radeon HD5650 driver
I say, blame Acer not AMD/ATI.
If Acer paired the 5850 with GDDR5, this review would have been completely different.
It is a choice of price and Acer does not manufacture cards themselves. If the GDDR5 version was more expensive what would you chose? Acer never takes fees for “name” and they sell cheap. Given that take into the consideration we are talking about a laptop with price like 1600-1700 EUR in Europe, which is high price for Acer.
We cannot blame Acer for the fact ATI advertises their new graphics cards and especially HD5850 more like a high-end. It turns that the only high-end laptop card they have is the HD5870 with GDDR5 or, if we ever see that – HD5850 GDDR5. And we do not believe the GDDR5 memory will fix everything anyway.
Right now HD5650 is much better choice with similar performance and features at few times lower cost.
[...] – Acer Aspire 8942G Nicht vom Notebookjournal, aber ein anderer zerschmetternder Bericht: ATI Mobility Radeon HD5850 1 GB DDR3 first benchmarks at Twisted-Reviews.com __________________ 8942G 4 GB Ram 2x 640 GB HDD ATI Radeon Mobility 5850 Windows 7 64Bit Home [...]
I would just like to point out Acer can choose how to incorporate AMD/ATI cards. it could have had 256bit-width but that was Acer cutting it in half not AMD/ATI
I bought the Acer 8942g-728 book and I am totally satisfied.
It is a desktop replacement it is not a high end gaming system replacement (No notebook will ever replace a such a system). (Also Bioshock 2, Borderland, WoW, Unreal Tournament 3, lastest Wolfenstein etc. runs full hd, highest quality … so wtf?)
And buying a Clevo-Book with the same feature, beside the VGA-Chip, you will pay more than 1000 Euro ( or $1450) additionally to get 8 GB RAM, a BluRay-Writer, a TV-Tuner, a Remote Controll and not to mention 1,3 TB ( sic est) harddisk capacity….
I bought a 8942, I AM satisfied with the laptop, but not with the performance of the 5850. It was not a cheap machine and i bought it for BFBC2, which i expected to run on full resolution on medium settings. Instead, I run it on minimum resolution with high texture and a couple of other things on medium for it to be PLAYABLE (not ideal). I am praying for better drivers. Laptop itself is really nice though :)
I just bought an Alienware with the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5850 with GDDR5 and the performance is piss poor. Even with the newest drivers the computer with an i7 6GB memory and win 7 64bit can’t run any 3D applications with playable framerates at native resolution. I’m FURIOUS and dell/alienware are too stupid to test their computers before they ship them so they don’t know about the problem. EPIC FAIL.