Radeon HD 5850 review (CrossfireX)

Resident Evil 5 (DirectX 10)

A new addition to our benchmark suite is Resident Evil 5. Capcom's newly released game ensures you a survival horror sequel that will let you bust up some zombies on your hard drive. Resident Evil 5 PC will support DirectX 9 and 10 along with ultra-high resolutions.

The game looks fantastic and has a built in benchmark. We test at 4x AA with all settings maxed out including BLUR activated. If you like to reproduce the benchmark scores yourself, then please select the fixed benchmark as we opted for a fixed time demo.

This benchmark was requested last week by you guys, as such I do not have any other results just yet. However, it's suffice to say that even at the very best image quality, Resident Evil 5 should run extremely smooth. Over time we'll collect more and more data from other graphics cards and in future reviews you'll be able to read them.

3DMark Vantage (DirectX 10)

3DMark Vantage focuses on the two areas most critical to gaming performance: the CPU and the GPU. With the emergence of multi-package and multi-core configurations on both the CPU and GPU side, the performance scale of these areas has widened, and the visual and game-play effects made possible by these configurations are accordingly wide-ranging. This makes covering the entire spectrum of 3D gaming a difficult task. 3DMark Vantage solves this problem in three ways:

1. Isolate GPU and CPU performance benchmarking into separate tests,
2. Cover several visual and game-play effects and techniques in four different tests, and
3. Introduce visual quality presets to scale the graphics test load up through the highest-end hardware.

To this end, 3DMark Vantage has two GPU tests, each with a different emphasis on various visual techniques, and two CPU tests, which cover the two most common CPU-side tasks: Physics Simulation and AI. It also has four visual quality presets (Entry, Performance, High, and Extreme) available in the Advanced and Professional versions, which increase the graphics load successively for even more visual quality. Each preset will produce a separate, official 3DMark Score, tagged with the preset in question.

The graphics load increases significantly from the lowest to the highest preset. The Performance preset is targeted for mid-range hardware with 256 MB of graphics memory. The Entry preset is targeted for integrated and low-end hardware with 128 MB of graphics memory. The higher presets require 512 MB of graphics memory, and are targeted for high-end and multi-GPU systems.

Download: 3DMark Vantage

With 3DMark Vantage we look at the three main results it returns in the 'P' performance test. Staggering numbers really. A lot can be said about the 3DMark series, yet the GPU test really is good and reproduces a very reliable number that scales pretty darn well and trustworthy.

Expect a GPU score of 13200 points, and depending on your system specifications roughly 14500 points for the overall P score if you are on a Core i7 platform. CrossfireX (two cards) shows a nice GPU score of nearly 21000 points and almost 21500 for the overall P score.