Performance Summary Diagrams

The first diagram compares the Radeon HD 5850 and the GeForce GTX 285, which come from the same price category, in the gaming tests. The recommended price of the Radeon HD 5850 is $299 as opposed to the GeForce GTX 285’s $339. However, it is likely that the retail price of the HD 5850 is going to be higher than recommended whereas the GeForce GTX 285 can only be bought for less than $300.

So, taking the performance of the GeForce GTX 285 as the reference point, here is how the Radeon HD 5850 compares to it.

The diagrams are indicative of the correlation between the graphics cards’ performance and the application-specific optimizations. For example, such games as Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason, Resident Evil 5 and, especially, Batman: Arkham Asylum run faster on the GeForce GTX 285 thanks to PhysX support whereas Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War 2, Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, BattleForge and, especially, Stormrise run better on Radeons. The Radeon HD 5850 is simply faster than Nvidia’s solution in the rest of the games, except for Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X.

The following diagrams compare the Radeon HD 5850 with the Radeon HD 5870 where the latter is taken as the reference point. The speed of the Radeon HD 5850 is shown in three modes: at its default 725/4000MHz frequencies, at the frequencies of the HD 5870 (i.e. 850/4800MHz), and at the highest frequencies of 1010/4960MHz. The first pair of diagrams shows the results at two resolutions without image quality enhancement techniques.

And this pair of diagrams shows the cards’ performance with full-screen antialiasing and anisotropic filtering.

The default Radeon HD 5850 is an average 12.7% slower than the Radeon HD 5870 in the low-quality modes and 14.1% slower in the high-quality modes. When the frequencies of the Radeon HD 5850 are increased to the level of the HD 5870 (850/4800MHz), the gap is smaller at 2% and 2.6%. When overclocked to the highest frequencies, our sample of Radeon HD 5850 is 8.2% and 6.7% faster than the senior model of the series in the respective modes.