Far Cry 2

Curiously enough, the Radeon HD 5850 is ahead of the GeForce GTX 285 in the low-quality image modes, but has no advantage when we turn on full-screen antialiasing and anisotropic filtering. Considering that the frame rate is comfortably high on every card, except for the Radeon HD 4890, in every mode, the FSAA + AF results are more important. And the Radeon HD 58xx, even though significantly better than the Radeon HD 4890 (and even better than the Radeon HD 4870 X2), have no advantage over the GeForce. We can also note the negligible difference between the Radeon HD 5850 and 5870 when both are working at the same frequencies. This difference is easily covered by overclocking the HD 5850 to its highest.

Call of Duty 5: World at War

This game is no difficulty for today’s graphics cards. Even the slowest Radeon HD 4890 (we wouldn’t dream of calling it “the slowest” just a month ago) ensures a comfortable frame rate in the hardest graphics quality mode and high resolution. The Radeon HD 5850 is not successful against the GeForce GTX 285 but gets as fast as the Radeon HD 5870 if overclocked to the latter’s frequencies. When overclocked to the highest possible frequencies, our Radeon HD 5850 even beats the dual-processor Radeon HD 4870 X2!

Left 4 Dead

It is clear that the graphics cards all hit the performance ceiling imposed by the speed of the platform (although our testbed is itself quite fast) in the easiest test mode. In the harder modes the Radeon HD 5850 equals the GeForce GTX 285 or even leaves it behind a little. The difference between same-frequency Radeon HD 5870 and HD 5850 is negligible. When overclocked to its maximum, the latter model beats every opponent excepting the GeForce GTX 295. We must note that the Radeon HD 58xx cards produced a fuzzy and darker image when we turned full-screen antialiasing on. That must be due to some flaws in the Catalyst driver.

Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason

Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason is one of PhysX-supporting games included into this test session. Alas, the Radeons are no match to the GeForce series here. But we can note that the Radeon HD 5850 and HD 5870 are close to the GeForce GTX 275 and GTX 285 and just a little slower than the dual-processor Radeon HD 4870 X2. The Radeon HD 5850 is identical to the HD 5870 when working at the same frequencies. Thus, the lack of 160 shader processors and 8 texture processors is not as significant as you might expect looking at the specs of the two models.