AMD’s Radeon HD 5850: The Other Shoe Drops
by Ryan Smith on September 30, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Batman: Arkham Asylum
Batman: Arkham Asylum is another brand-new PC game, and has been burning up the review charts. It’s an Unreal Engine 3 based game, something that’s not immediately obvious from just looking at it, which is rare for UE3 based games.
NVIDIA has put a lot of marketing muscle into the game as part of their The Way It’s Meant to Be Played program, and as a result it ships with PhysX support and 3D Vision support. Unfortunately NVIDIA’s influence has extended to its anti-aliasing abilities too, as its in-game selective AA abilities only work on NVIDIA’s cards. AMD’s cards can perform AA on the game, but only via traditional full screen anti-aliasing, which isn’t nearly as efficient. Because of this, this is the only game where we will not be using AA, as doing so produces meaningless results given the different AA modes used.
Since we can’t use AA, the name of the game is still “runaway performance”, with the 5850 bringing in 88fps. Meanwhile this is as close a gap between the 5850 and the GTX 285 as we’re going to see, with the 5850 beating the GTX 285 by only a few percent. The 5850 Crossfire maintains a similar gap, but doesn’t fall behind as it has in some tests.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
95 Comments
View All Comments
bigboxes - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
Well, you meant YOUR HTPC case. Not all HTPCs are limited to half-cards. Although, I thik that these fan blower cooling solutions are horrible for HTPC applications with their horrible whine. It may be awhile until aftermarket solutions are out for this new line.NA1NSXR - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
...thats what he said.gigahertz20 - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
I'm surprised it performs so closely with the 5870 yet cooler running and doesn't demand so much from your power supply. I think this is my next card come Christmas time, unless Nvidia releases some details about their next generation GPU's along with expected prices before then.I've read rumors that we will not see any Nvidia cards for sale until next year...ouch, but I'm betting they release before Christmas. Missing the holiday buying season would be a real stupid move for Nvidia.
melgross - Wednesday, September 30, 2009 - link
It isn't a matter of stupid. It's a matter of what they can do. If they can do it, we know they will, but if they can't, well, that's a problem.blanarahul - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 - link
These younger brothers of the fastest parts are always great.GTX 570, 470, 260, 8800 GTS all were superb value cards with high performance!