AMD ATI Radeon HD 5850 Performance Review
Test Setup and 3DMark Vantage
HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM: We tested the graphics cards in this article on an Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 motherboard powered by a Core i7 965 quad-core processor and 6GB of OCZ DDR3 RAM. The first thing we did when configuring the test system was enter the system BIOS and set all values to their "optimized" or "high performance" default settings. Then we manually configured the memory timings and disabled any integrated peripherals that wouldn't be put to use. The hard drive was then formatted, and Windows 7 Ultimate x64 was installed. When the installation was complete we fully updated the OS and installed the latest hotfixes, along with the necessary drivers and applications.
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Hardware Used: |
Relevant Software: Windows 7 Ultimate x64 ATI Catalyst v9.10b NVIDIA GeForce Drivers v191.00 Benchmarks Used: 3DMark Vantage v1.0.1 FarCry 2 H.A.W.X. Crysis* Left 4 Dead* Enemy Territory: Quake Wars v1.5* * - Custom benchmark |
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The latest version of Futuremark's synthetic 3D gaming benchmark, 3DMark Vantage, is specifically bound to Windows Vista-based systems because it uses some advanced visual technologies that are only available with DirectX 10, which y isn't available on previous versions of Windows. 3DMark Vantage isn't simply a port of 3DMark06 to DirectX 10 though. With this latest version of the benchmark, Futuremark has incorporated two new graphics tests, two new CPU tests, several new feature tests, in addition to support for the latest PC hardware. We tested the graphics cards here with 3DMark Vantage's Extreme preset option, which uses a resolution of 1920x1200 with 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering. |
As the 3DMark Vantage results show, the closest competitor to the Radeon HD 5850 in terms of performance is the GeForce GTX 285. NVIDIA's current high-end single-GPU based card performs somewhat better than the Radeon HD 5850 here, but keep in mind the GeForce's numbers are enhanced by its support for PhysX, which is used in some of the Vantage tests.
