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.

Far Cry 2 gives these cards no trouble at 1920x1200, although the Toxic's higher performance does allow it to boast a sixty frames per second minimum frame rate, which is nice.

Performance gets hit pretty hard with 8x multi-sampling in place, although it does allow for the Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 Toxic to snag a 7.2% performance lead as frame rates continue to look respectable on both cards.

Moving up to 2560x1600 does little to hurt either the reference or Sapphire Toxic Radeon HD 5850, with the latter leading the way by 5.7% at this resolution.

Performance takes a real hit at our highest test settings to the point of bordering the unplayable, although the faster Radeon HD 5850 Toxic does at least manage to boast a thirty frames per second average, posting a 7.4% gain over a reference card on account of its higher clocks.

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, while CPU limitations mean there's little between these two cards as they both hit well over one hundred frames per second on average.

Forcing anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering from ATI's Catalyst Control Center sees performance remain stellar on both cards, while the Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 opens up a ten frame per second lead here on average, equating to almost a 13.2% performance advantage.

2560x1600 brings us more high frame rate numbers, as the Radeon HD 5850 in any shape or form continues to breeze through this title.

It's only when we add 8x multi-sampling at this high resolution that the 1GB frame buffer of these cards become a problem, simply decimating performance.   Needless to say, our highest test settings aren't playable with this title.