Real-world benchmarks

Now we move on to a far more important topic - Real-world game testing. Here, we put the XFX Radeon HD 5850 Black Edition through its paces under Windows 7 Home Premium x64 in no less than eight current game titles. In the case of both boards, if only to keep things consistent, we will be focusing our testing firstly at the broad target resolution of 1920x1200, followed by some far more GPU intensive rendering at 2560x1600 for you 30" LCD owners out there to stress the boards more fully. This will be tested first without any anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering, followed by testing with 8x AA and 16x AF enabled to make use of some of the extra eye candy on offer with this part.

So, now you know what we're up to, let's crack straight on with our results!

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat

It may not have been released worldwide just yet, but S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat is one of the first DirectX 11 titles to hit the market, sporting tessellation and improved ambient occlusion to graphics board capable of utilising said API. We test here using the recently released standalone benchmark for Call of Pripyat, focusing our attentions on its "Night" timedemo (arguably the most representative of real-world performance) while cranking all image quality settings to their highest levels to enjoy all of the goodies that DirectX 11 has to offer.

At 1920x1200, our factory overclocked XFX board serves up a 7% performance increase, taking the already playable frame rate of the reference board even closer to a sixty frames per second average.

Turning on 4x multi-sampling has a pretty hefty impact on frame rates regardless of clock speed here, meaning that performance here isn't quite ideal even with the XFX part's 6.6% boost to frame rates.

2560x1600 brings us slightly higher performance, complete with a 6% advantage for the Radeon HD 5850 Black Edition, but this still might not quite be fast enough to be considered entirely playable.

Neither card can really push a playable frame rate in this title at our highest test settings, despite performance increases served up by our XFX part.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is the latest title to make use of id Software's Doom 3 engine, while also integrating into it another of John Carmack's creations - MegaTexture. The principle of MegaTexture is to enable developers to use massive textures to create realistic looking landscapes without hugely impacting graphics performance, a noble cause which appears to work pretty well in this title, bringing large outdoor arenas to the Doom 3 engine for the first time. We test this title with all graphical details set to their highest levels.

We're somewhat CPU limited in this older title at 1920x1200 with fantastic performance the order of the day, but our XFX offering still sneaks in a 4.4% frame rate boost here.

Adding 8x multi-sampling and 16x anisotropy to the rendering workload sees the Radeon HD 5850 Black Edition stretch its legs a little via a 6.7% lead, although a reference board can still offer up more than enough rendering horsepower at these settings.

2560x1600 really showcases the benefits of the Black Edition's clock speeds via a 9.3% performance gain over a reference board, although once again said reference part is no slouch in its own right.

A reference Radeon HD 5850 finally drops below a perfect sixty frames per second average at our highest test settings, while XFX's Black Edition SKU can leverage an 8.7% advantage to creep much closer to that target frame rate.