ATI Radeon HD 5850 CrossFire Video Card Review

Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X.

Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. (High Altitude Warfare eXperimental squadron) is an aerial warfare video game developed by Ubisoft Romania and published by Ubisoft for Microsoft Windows. It was released in United States on March 6, 2009 and features Microsoft DirectX 10.1 game play.

I used this benchmark back in April 2009 in my original coverage of the GeForce 275 versus the Radeon HD 4890, but some new patches have come out that have greatly impacted performance. I also didn’t show the differences between DX9, DX10 and DX10.1 the first time around, but this time I will.

For this game VSync was turned off, but Antialiasing was turned on and set to 8x for better image quality.

All of the DirectX 10 options were set to high including Ambient occlusion (SSAO) on both the NVIDIA and ATI graphics cards. The game was patched with update v1.2, which was the most current patch.

Benchmark Results: HAWX is another game that shines with more than two GPU’s in the system. At 1920×1200, the single Radeon HD 5870 is behind the GeForce GTX 295 by less than 5% and Radeon HD 4870X2 by about 10%. 5870 CrossFire on the other hand is nearly 35% faster than the 4870X2 and 41% faster than GTX 295! The Radeon HD 5850 was significantly faster than the Radeon HD 4890 and GeForce GTX 285 video cards.