ATI Radeon 5850 & 5830 Review - Hitting 60fps

Submitted by skipclarke on 25 April, 2010 - 16:17

Article Type: 
Review

While our testing is designed to stress the card as much as possible, we all realize that games have quality settings for a reason. So, beyond seeing where the breaking point is for any individual card, I wanted to provide some insight into what image quality you can expect and get 60fps at 5760x1080 (3x1920x1080) Eyefinity. These settings are for the HD 5850. Settings for the HD 5830 would need to be slightly lower.

Note, it is simply not possible to hit 60fps in some games at this resolution. In those instances we shot for 30fps.

Batman: Arkham Asylum - Turning off AA allows you to hit 60fps with the 5850. Dropping to 0xAA/High, and we posted 77fps. 2xAA/High clocks in at 48fps. The only difference between Very High and High is turning Ambient Occlusion on or off.

Battle Forge - There is no hitting 60fps on any single card. With the HD 5850, I could only get in the 40's if I set it to 4800x900, turned off AA, stopped forcing DX11, turned off SSAO and set everything to medium. Battle Forge is simply a 30fps game in Eyefinity.

Dirt 2 - I hit 51fps with 4800x900 @ 0xAA. I took everything set at "Ultra" down to "High". I also lowered Post Processing from High to Low. With plenty of options, there are a number of variations available to suit your taste.

Far Cry 2 - In Far Cry 2, 56fps can be attained with 0xAA/High. Scores pushed past 60fps by dropping the resolution to 4800x900.

GTA IV - Considering the problems I had trying to improve performance on my Eyefinity6 review, I didn't bother going through the effort here.

H.A.W.X. - I was able to get 56fps by turning each of the DX10 effects down a notch. This means Shadows and Sun Shafts at Low, and SSAO at Medium. I hit 69fps by turning SSAO down to Low.

Heaven Demo - It is not possible to hit 60fps with this benchmark on a single GPU at Eyefinity resolutions. Considering it is meant to test/tax your system, that is to be expected. Here is what I was able to achieve:

  • DX9: 4800x900, 0xAA, 2xAF, low shaders - 30fps, med shaders - 25fps
  • DX10: 4800x900, 0xAA, 2xAF, low shaders - 27fps, med shaders - 23fps
  • DX11: 4800x900, 0xAA, 2xAF, tessellation enabled, low shaders - 20fps, med shaders - 20fps

Half-Life 2 - The 5850 hits 60fps in both Lost Coast and Ep2.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Hitting even 30fps isn't possible on the 5850 or 5830 with DX10 or DX11 effects. I was able to crack 30fps by dropping all the way back to DX9 code path and features.

High Preset, DX11, 4800x900, 2xAA, DX10.1 style MSAA, HDAO SSAO, Ultra SSAO, Use DX10.1:

  • Day - 21fps
  • Night - 18fps
  • Rain - 19fps
  • Sun Shafts - 16fps