Date:
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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AMD ATI Radeon HD 5970 Video Card Review

Just when you thought there was no way to outdo the 5800 series, AMD gives us the ATI Radeon HD 5970. It has two GPUs on a single PCB and brings with it CrossFireX in a single PCIe x16 slot. We show you if it is worth your hard earned cash.

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Batman: Arkham Asylum

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We are using the full Steam version of Batman: Arkham Asylum patched to version 1.1. We have an evaluation gameplay here. This is an Unreal Engine 3 game and does support PhysX, and we are going to treat that like any other game. We will use PhysX where appropriate, which is not here in this evaluation. Due to support issues, we have to use the ATI control panel to force on AA, while NVIDIA video cards may use in-game AA settings. We have also forced on 16X AF on all video cards. Our run-through in this evaluation is going to be the very first mission, "Intensive Treatment." We found this first level to actually be quite demanding on graphics, and other than the "Scarecrow" level, is one of the more graphically intensive areas. Through most of the game you are indoors, and performance is quite high since it is closed indoor spaces. Our run-through lasts ten minutes.

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Right off the bat we encountered an odd performance anomaly in Batman with CrossFireX when forcing AA from the control panel. It seems that without AA, performance is stellar and outperforms an ATI Radeon HD 5870 as well as a GeForce GTX 295 easily in our testing. However, once we forced on AA from the control panel we encountered a severe performance drop in the game. At 8X AA at 2560x1600 the drop was so severe that it rendered the game unplayable. However, at 4X AA we still experienced this drop in performance, but it wasn’t as severe as 8X AA and allowed us to play the game smoothly. The ATI Radeon HD 5870 did not experience this drop in performance when enabling AA. Therefore, this appears to be a bug with CrossFireX and multi-GPU 5800 series video cards from AMD right now as it happened on both the Radeon HD 5970 and Radeon HD 5850 CrossFireX setups as well.

Since this problem occurred, our highest playable settings were 4X AA at 2560x1600 on all three video cards. There was negligible performance difference between the Radeon HD 5970 and Radeon HD 5850 CrossFireX configuration. You can see that the Radeon HD 5970 was much faster than the Radeon HD 5870 until performance dropped off with AA enabled. We are aware of third party programs that can be used to force AA from within the game and bypass the control panel for AMD video cards, but they are unofficially supported of course.

When all is said and done in Batman we find NVIDIA has a performance advantage with AA plus the ability to enable PhysX. We saw no gameplay advantages in this game with the Radeon HD 5970, but that doesn’t mean other games are like this game; this game is the exception to the rule.