Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II

Although Nvidia took part in the development of Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War II, ATI’s new-generation solutions are quite competitive to the GeForce series. Take note of the weak support of dual-processor configurations in this game. Neither the Radeon HD 4870 X2 nor the GeForce GTX 295 can win here. It is the overclocked Radeon HD 5850 that takes top place. Take note that FSAA and AF do not affect the speed of the Radeon cards much although the resulting image quality improvement is obvious.

BattleForge

BattleForge, the only DirectX 11 game in this test session, was developed in collaboration with ATI, so the GeForce GTX 295 is the only opponent to ATI’s solutions here. The Radeon HD 5850 and HD 5870 deliver the same performance if their frequencies are equal. The latter card is the fastest choice for fans of this very beautiful strategy.

Stormrise

Do not wonder at the low performance of the GeForce series. Like BattleForge, Stormrise is an ATI-optimized game with support for DirectX 10.1. Nvidia has no chance here. The Radeon HD 5850 performs brilliantly, delivering at the default frequencies almost two times the performance of the GeForce GTX 285. It is almost as fast as the Radeon HD 5870 at the same frequencies and successfully competes with the dual-processor Radeon HD 4870 X2 at the highest frequencies.

Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X.

For an unclear reason, we could not launch the DirectX 10 version of Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. under Windows 7, so we had to test the cards in the DirectX 9 version of the game. Here are the results:

This test is not quite correct due to the above-mentioned reason, so we won’t compare ATI and Nvidia here. As for the Radeon HD 5850 and HD 5870 at the same frequencies, they deliver the same performance in this game, getting very close to the Radeon HD 4870 X2. When overclocked to the highest frequencies, the Radeon HD 5850 is as fast as ATI’s dual-processor giant.