Conclusion

The Radeon HD 5870 and HD 5850 both left a highly positive impression on me, but it is not so clear with the CrossFireX configurations based on them. Such configurations indeed offer the highest performance available today but in some games two GeForce GTX 285 in SLI mode beat the Radeon HD 5850 tandem and, occasionally, the Radeon HD 5870 pair, too. A Radeon HD 58xx-based CrossFireX configuration needs a fast platform that would not limit the speed of the graphics subsystem. It also needs support on the side of the game without which purchasing two such cards won’t make any sense.

Another drawback of such powerful configurations is the lack of PhysX support as was indicated by the results of the Radeon HD 5870 + GeForce GTX 275 subsystem in Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason and Batman: Arkham Asylum. And these are only two games that I used in my tests – you can benchmark graphics cards in them without FRAPS. A full list of PhysX-supporting games can be found here. I don’t mean that the lack of PhysX should prevent you from buying a Radeon HD 58xx, but you should be aware of this fact anyway.

As for building CrossFireX subsystems, I could not correctly install the Catalyst driver for both cards at a first attempt. The system would not see the second Radeon HD 5870. So, I first installed one card, rebooted the system a couple of times and added another one. And then, after a third reboot, I successfully enabled CrossFireX mode. There were occasional jerks in Lost Planet: Colonies that I mentioned in me review of the single card. In Call of Duty 5: World at War the menu would be replaced with a black square for a couple of seconds (but there were no problems in the game proper). Besides the games included into this test session I also checked CrossFireX out in Borderlands, Painkiller: Resurrection and Left 4 Dead 2 (demo) and had no problems playing them.