ATI Radeon HD 5850 Pro Reviews

What have we learned by looking at the performance of three Radeon cards from the last three generations? Well, a few things, actually. Taking the Radeon HD 5850, HD 6850 and HD 7850 into account in this same-frequency face-off, the first point to note is that AMD has demoted the x850 line from the best single-GPU silicon to second-best GPU. This fact alone renders this an apples-to-oranges comparison. Radeon HD 5850 is a better card than the name now suggests, and we can empirically prove this by how well it competes against the HD 6850 and HD 7850. Really, a 30-month-old card should be slaughtered by cutting-edge competition, even if the older GPU's clocks are raised, but this isn't generally the case. We feel comfortable in saying that Radeon HD 5850 owners, and there are many, shouldn't feel compelled to 'upgrade' to a Radeon HD 6850 or HD 7850 on the rather large proviso that the majority of their gaming takes place at 1,920x1,080 resolution and below. Meanwhile, Radeon HD 6850 shouldn't really be in the same class as the HD 5850 or HD 7850. Perhaps a better name for it is the already-taken HD 6750? AMD understands its positioning and has reduced the buy-in price of the GPU silicon enough for partners to sell retail cards for £110... and even as low as £99 on special deals. It's a decent-enough card once the price dropped to the present £110, we suppose. And this brings us nicely on to the Radeon HD 7850 2GB card that was paper-launched just the other day. It's a quality card that's the epitome of mainstream gaming - cool, small, and potentially very quiet - but widespread adoption may be stymied by the launch price of close to £200. It's almost guaranteed to drop to around £175 once NVIDIA retaliates with its own mainstream GeForce magic - which is currently wending its way through the manufacturing process and out to retail - and an HD 7850 costing £150, if it should come to pass, would represent an excellent investment.

Two HD 5850s are definitely better than a single card in almost every game. To take advantage of two cards of this magnitude you almost have to turn up FSAA to 8x and AF to 16x as performance with 4x FSAA is nearly CPU limited on a Core i7 920. Turning up the image quality is a benefit everyone can appreciate as the games are not stressed by two cards at 4X at all. Performance in games increases 30-40% over a single card in every case except Batman Arkham Asylum which has issues running in Crossfire mode.

For $259 the ATI Radeon HD 5850 smacks the competition then laughs. AMD has engineered this series smartly, doing what worked for it with the Radeon HD 4800 series.

There you have it. A week after introducing the Radeon HD 5870, AMD is ready with the more affordable Radeon HD 5850. It is not the barn-burner that the 5870 is, but for the money, the Radeon HD 5850 is supremely attractive. Gamers in the market for a powerful graphics card, that supports all of the latest technologies, need look no further.

AMD has built a product that truly stands out from the competition with the Radeon HD 5800-series of cards. Though we have already reviewed the HD 5870, it and the new HD 5850 are really going to put NVIDIA in a bad position this coming holiday if they can’t somehow magically deliver a new architecture by years-end. The new Radeon HD 5850 is definitely the best card you can get in the $250 price range today and I think is my best overall pick for all gamers.

What AMD/ATI has accomplished with the Radeon HD 5850 GPU is the distillation of the range-topping goodness in an eminently sensible fashion, made possible by the use of a smaller PCB allied to widely-available 4GHz-rated GDDR5 memory. Overall, the ATI Radeon HD 5850 1,024MB sets a new performance and features standard at the £200 price point, and, taking value into account, we'd recommend most readers opt for one over the also-impressive HD 5870.

AMD's Radeon HD 5850 should continue to be a hot seller. It owns the sub-£250 space and a two-card setup is an alluring option that gives GeForce GTX 480 serious pause for thought. Got £500 to spend on a graphics? Buy two Radeon HD 5850s and a top gaming title.

Well, there you have it. The Radeon HD 5850 manages to outshine the fastest single-GPU GeForce card overall while costing less, drawing less power, and producing less noise. We wouldn't be surprised to see Nvidia cut prices in the near future, but in any case, the 5850 is hands-down the second-fastest single-GPU graphics card on the market.

We’re perfectly comfortable calling the Radeon HD 5850 a solid buy for the reasons a gamer would buy a new graphics card today.

Can ATI's cut-down enthusiast card make the same impact as its bargain predecessor? We put it through its gaming paces to find out