Far Cry 2

It may not have much in common with the original Far Cry aside from its name, but Ubisoft's Far Cry 2 offers a fantastic graphical experience in its depiction of a war-torn Africa rife with mercenaries and various factions fighting one another. For our testing here, we've used the DirectX 10 rendering mode, with all in-game graphical details set to "Ultra High" to give these graphics boards a real test.

Once again, a reference Radeon HD 5850 more than cuts the mustard at 1920x1200 in this title, with our XFX Black Edition part adding a cherry on top in the form of a 5.7% performance gain.

This lead grows to 6.9% once we enable 8x multi-sampling and 16x anisotropic filtering, improving performance to what could be a noticeable extent at these particular settings.

2560x1600 sees a smaller lead for the XFX Radeon HD 5850 Black Edition once again, of around 5.7% on this occasion, while our reference board is still very much in the reckoning in performance terms.

The Radeon HD 5850 finally drops below thirty frames per second on average at our highest test settings, with the higher clock speeds of the XFX Black Edition board doing their bit to keep that particular card afloat just above that watermark via a 7% performance increase.

Batman: Arkham Asylum

Despite all of the controversy surrounding this title's use of NVIDIA's PhysX technology and its place in their "The Way It's Meant To Be Played" strategy, there can be no argument that Batman: Arkham Asylum is a contender for game of the year, and sports a fantastic Unreal Engine 3-based look to boot. We test here with everything set to their highest levels (PhysX aside which we disable, of course), using the game's built-in timedemo functionality.

Performance here is stunning at 1920x1200 on both boards, although our average frame rate does increase by 7.4% thanks to the higher clock speeds of XFX's Radeon HD 5850 Black Edition.

Things remain playable on a reference part with 8x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering forced via the driver control panel - This particular configuration allows the XFX Radeon HD 5850 Black Edition to leap into a 14.5% performance lead however, making for one of its most impressive showings thus far.

A little over 7% separates these two Radeon HD 5850 boards at 2560x1600, as they both continue to offer eminently playable performance.

8x multi-sampling at this high resolution exhausts the 1GB frame buffer of both of these boards in places - Put simply, you'll need more video memory to play this title at the settings in question.