Benchmark Results: Far Cry 2
In Far Cry 2, the Radeon HD 5850s actually end up outperforming the Radeon HD 5970 by a miniscule margin. Remember that we’re testing on an X58-based platform here, so each 5850 gets a full 16-lanes of PCIe 2.0, whereas the Radeon HD 5970 consists of two Cypress GPUs on either side of a PCI Express bridge sharing 16 lanes total.
The difference between ATI’s fastest discrete board and Nvidia’s is much more significant, though. The thing is that recent price drops have taken most GTX 295s to about $500. So, by no stretch of the imagination is ATI’s Radeon HD 5970 functioning as a value proposition. Rather, it’s the fastest discrete graphics card you can buy—and you’ll pay for the privilege of owning it.
Apply anti-aliasing and the Radeon HD 5970 and 5850s in CrossFire once again trade blows. And yet again, they both blow away Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 295, matching or coming close to twin GeForce GTX 285s in SLI.
