The Radeon HD 5870 was the first DX11 card, released back in 2009, and as shocking as it may seem, it’s been over 10 years since that date. I still remember buying a Radeon HD 4890 earlier that same year, because my Geforce 8800gt from 2007 was starting to struggle with late 2008 games like Fallout 3 and Stalker Clear Sky. So I decided to sit out the early DX11 generation with a late DX10 card. But that was OK, because I was still using Windows XP at the time, not wanting to pay for the abomination known as Windows Vista, and all the games from 2008 – 2011 still ran great in DX9 mode. But the Radeon HD 5870 was an impressive card and a huge success for AMD, not only because Nvidia flopped with their delayed DX11 hardware, but also because with 1600 shaders, the 5870 was literally twice as powerful as their high end DX10 hardware – the 800 shader Radeon HD 4890. In a way, the Radeon HD 5870 was AMD’s revolutionary, groundbreaking, history-making moment the same way the 8800gtx was for Nvidia back in 2006.

But enough with the rhetoric. What I really want to see is how this revolutionary groundbreaking graphics card stood the test of time. If one was to theoretically buy a Radeon HD 5870 in 2009, then how long would the card remain useful? Would it still be able to run games released 8, 9, or 10 years later? How does the Radeon HD 5870 perform in modern games?

Let’s find out in the video: