Performance Summary Diagrams

The first two diagrams compare the performance of the Radeon HD 5850 CrossFireX and the GeForce GTX 285 SLI where the latter is taken as the reference point.

The two pairs of graphics cards are comparable in price and comparable in performance. The GeForce GTX 285 SLI is better in four games, namely Crysis, Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason, Batman: Arkham Asylum and Resident Evil 5. The two Radeon HD 5850 cards beat their opponent in eight games: World in Conflict, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Far Cry 2, Call of Duty 5: World at War, BattleForge, Stormrise, Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. and Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood. In the remaining five games there is no clear winner. These are Lost Planet: Colonies, Warhammer 40 000: Dawn of War II, Wolfenstein, Unreal Tournament 3 and Left 4 Dead. In some games the gap is negligible. In others it is as large as 76%. It is not easy to choose between these tandems. Besides such a high variation in performance depending on the specific game, there are such factors to be considered as DirectX 10, PhysX, antialiasing quality, power consumption and noise level.

The next pair of diagrams shows the difference between CrossFire tandems built out of two Radeon HD 5870 and two Radeon HD 5850, the latter being the reference point.

The difference is actually the same as between the respective single cards. The senior models are 12.7% ahead in the low-quality image mode and 13.1% ahead in the FSAA + AF mode.

The third pair of diagrams shows the difference between two CrossFireX tandems and a single GeForce GTX 295 taken as the reference point.

The CrossFireX configurations easily beat the fastest dual-processor card from Nvidia in most of tests, but any CrossFireX tandem with Radeon HD 58xx cards is going to cost more than a GeForce GTX 295. So, this comparison does not make much practical sense.

And finally, the last two diagrams show the performance growth of CrossFireX and SLI configurations relative to the respective single cards.

The Radeon HD 5870 tandem delivers an average 53% performance growth in the low-quality mode and 59% in the FSAA+AF mode. For the Radeon HD 5850 CrossFireX these numbers are 57% and 64%. For the GeForce GTX 285 SLI, the performance growth is 70 and 77%, respectively. Why does the Radeon HD 5850 tandem show more efficiency under the same conditions than the Radeon HD 5870 tandem? I guess the more advanced configuration is just more limited by the CPU.