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- Date:
- Wednesday, September 30, 2009
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
AMD's ATI Radeon HD 5850 Video Card Review
The ATI Radeon HD 5850 is launching today! It is based on the same 5800 architecture as the HD 5870. We aim to find out how it compares to an HD 5870 in single GPU and 5850 CrossFireX configurations. The ATI Radeon HD 5850 is bringing with it an incredible PC gaming value.
Need for Speed: Shift
Need for Speed: Shift is the next title in the Need for Speed franchise. This new game completely changes gameplay compared to everything before it. The new NFS: Shift is a DX9 game, but employs the latest DX9 graphical features such as HDR, depth of field, motion blur, high quality shadows, multisample AA on alpha textures and crisp high quality textures. For our manual run-through we will drive on the Nordschleife track, which is 12+ miles long and lasts 10 minutes. We have enabled 15 opponents to burden the system, and the time of day set is "Midday."
Highest Playable Settings
We need to first reiterate that AMD feels NFS: Shift isn’t performing as well as it could on the Radeon HD 5800 series. They have made a statement we quoted on this page. They feel it is being held back, and future patches/drivers will hopefully fix these performance issues. Even with these problems, we feel the game performs fantastically on the Radeon HD 5800 series. To think that THIS is slow to AMD says a lot about their commitment to performance out of the HD 5800 series!
The ATI Radeon HD 5850 was able to push NFS: Shift to 2560x1600 with 8X true MSAA with the highest in-game settings. The GeForce GTX 285 was also able to push the game at 8X AA, but it is using NVIDIA’s CSAA method, which is not true MSAA. Therefore, the Radeon HD 5850 is doing more "work" in terms of AA, but still producing superior framerates to the GeForce GTX 285. That aside, the gameplay experience between both video cards was identical in this game; you could not tell them apart.
ATI Radeon HD 5850 CrossFireX was playable at 12X CFAA (Edge Detect) at 2560x1600. We thought we’d be able to hit 24X CFAA in this game at 2560x1600 due to all the shader horsepower present here, but it had a severe performance impact running at 24X CFAA. We went from very high performance at 12X CFAA as you can see, to framerates that dropped down to 3 FPS in-game with 24X CFAA. Perhaps it is a bug, because we do not see any reason why Radeon HD 5850 CrossFireX couldn’t run 24X CFAA at this resolution. CFAA modes do not tax memory, only streaming processor units, and with two 5850 video cards there are plenty of them. Dropping down to 1920x1200 did allow 24X CFAA to be enabled, and we saw framerates range between 60-80 FPS at 1920x1200 with 24X CFAA. Maybe our CFAA expectation is too high?
Therefore, perhaps this is part of what AMD was talking about poor performance in NFS: Shift; there apparently is a problem with performance as they have stated. Yet, despite that, HD 5850 still delivers an exceptional gameplay experience in this game.
We also tried Supersampling AA on the Radeon HD 5850, and it was playable at 2X SSAA at 1920x1200, no higher.
Superior Antialiasing Performance
Similar to Crysis: Warhead we experienced phenomenal antialiasing performance in NFS: Shift. In fact, we saw absolutely no difference in performance between 4X and 8X AA with a SINGLE Radeon HD 5850 at 2560x1600.
This graph above shows 2560x1600 at 4X and 8X AA on a single Radeon HD 5850. It is clear as a bell; there is no performance difference between 4X and 8X AA. That is how fast this card is at AA, and it is not due to be CPU limited because this game uses Transparency Multisampling antialiasing on all vegetation and foliage in the game. The level of TR MSAA increases with the level of edge AA. Therefore, there is a LOT of AA happening in this game, on every object, and all grass and trees, which there are a lot of, so the video cards are definitely being pushed when AA is enabled at 4X and 8X at 2560x1600.
Apples to Apples
In our apples-to-apples testing we have setup two graphs for you to compare with, to make things easier to read.
We are testing at 2560x1600 4X AA/16X AF.
HD 5850, 5850 CrossFireX vs. HD 5870
The ATI Radeon HD 5850 is right where it should be in relation to the Radeon HD 5870. When we install two HD 5850’s and enable CrossFireX we see a huge performance increase. However, you will notice that with CrossFireX this game suffers some spikes in performance.
Fear not though, while it looks bad on a graph, we did not sense or feel these spikes in performance as we were playing. You see, they are dropping to a still very high 50 FPS, and we just did not feel that slowdown while we were gaming. In fact, we had no idea it was even doing this until we looked at the graphed data, we just didn’t get the sense that it was happening in-game. This could be related to some of the performance issues AMD mentioned.
HD 5850, 5850 CrossFireX vs. GTX 285
Compared to the GeForce GTX 285, the HD 5850 matches performance at 4X AA. However, as we saw above, when pushing the cards harder at 8X AA the HD 5850 edges out with higher performance.