Radeon HD 5850: Knocking Down GTX 295 In CrossFire

Benchmark Results: H.A.W.X.

The Radeon HD 5850 is as fast as or faster than Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 285 at a significantly lower price point. Two of the cards blow past not only the GeForce GTX 295, but also two GeForce GTX 285s in an SLI config. One 5850 fails to impress (especially if you check out the 4890’s comparable results), but two simply smoke the rest of the field (except the 5870s, of course).

When you’re playing a flight sim like H.A.W.X., you don’t need the killer frame rates of a first-person shooter, so the 38 frames we get from a single Radeon HD 5850 at 2560x1600 really end up “feeling” like enough—I know this because I’ve played the game with this same setup. Meanwhile, it’d take a no-longer-available Radeon HD 4870 X2 or pair of GeForce GTX 285s to get close to that at such a high resolution with 8xAA enabled.

CrossFire scales well here. If you’re using a pair of Radeon HD 5850s or 5870s, two cards at 2560x1600 with 8xAA turned on are faster than a single card at 1680x1050 and 8xAA.