Performance

ATI Radeon cards are marked in red in the diagrams. Nvidia’s solutions are marked in green. The only exception is the Radeon HD 5850 overclocked to its maximum frequencies, which is marked in purple. First come the synthetic benchmarks.

3DMark 2006

3DMark Vantage

Both synthetic benchmarks produce the same picture. The Radeon HD 5850 is better than the GeForce GTX 285, although the difference is not too big. When overclocked to the frequencies of the HD 5870, the HD 5850 gets very close to the latter and both are ahead of the dual-processor Radeon HD 4870 X2 in three out of the four test modes (the total of the two Futuremark applications). The Radeon HD 5850, overclocked to maximum frequencies, easily leaves the more expensive model from the same series behind.

Unigine Heaven Demo

The newest benchmark from Unigine Corp. supports DirectX 9, 10, 11, OpenGL, and hardware tessellation (only for DirectX 11 cards). It is very beautiful, especially on Radeon HD 58xx cards:

We used the following settings:

Anisotropic filtering and full-screen antialiasing were set according to the test mode. Here are the results:

Yes, the Radeon HD 58xx have low results. It is because they were tested in DirectX 11 mode and showed all the beauty of Unigine Heaven. If tested in DirectX 10 mode, the Radeon HD 58xx series are 20-22fps (at the low-quality settings) and 10-11fps (at the high-quality settings) faster than in DirectX 11 mode and only inferior to the dual-processor solutions then.

We guess we should show you the visual difference between the two latest versions of DirectX:

Looks impressive, isn’t it? The pavement in the left screenshot seems to be much easier to walk on than the right-screenshot pavement, though. :)

World in Conflict

The default Radeon HD 5850 can only beat the competing GeForce GTX 285 in the low-quality mode. When we turn on FSAA and anisotropic filtering, the GeForce GTX 285 goes ahead although the Radeon HD 5850 is no worse in terms of bottom speed.

It is when we overclock the HD 5850 that we see the most exciting things. The Radeon HD 5850 is a mere 1-2fps behind the Radeon HD 5870 when both are working at the same frequencies. Thus, this game is indifferent to the Radeon HD 5850 having some of its GPU subunits disabled. Moreover, the more expensive Radeon HD 5870 is left behind when the HD 5850 is overclocked to 1010/4960MHz. The latter card takes third place then, right behind the dual-processor Radeon HD 4870 X2 and GeForce GTX 295. An impressive performance!