AMD Radeon HD 5850 1GB Review – Cyprus gets a bit cheaper

Batman: Arkham Asylum

One of the best received gaming titles on both console and PC for 2009, Batman: Arkham Asylum is an impressive game both visually and in terms of design. 



One interesting note: Batman (personally) doesn’t allow setting AA levels in-game for AMD graphics card but DOES for NVIDIA GPUs.  We instead enabled AA in the AMD Catalyst Control Panel where noted.



While I still take some issue with Batman: Arkham Asylum and its desire to ONLY run in-game based antialiasing algorithms on NVIDIA cards, the results here are what you will see as an end user.  The HD 5850 is definitely ahead of the HD 4890 in our testing (as to be expected) though it is only on par with the GeForce GTX 275 – that leaves the GTX 285 with a considerable performance gap even at the lower resolutions.




In this series of tests you can see that CrossFire is scaling very well across Batman, reaching as high as 88% at 2560×1600 resolution.  The HD 5870 has about a 20% performance lead on the HD 5850 as well.

Now we have our opinions and a demonstration of Batman: Arkham Asylum using AMD Eyefinity technology.