ATI Radeon HD 5870 + 5850 Crossfire – Mixing Video Cards

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: in H.A.W.X. we again see the mixed CrossFire solution performing slower than a pair of Radeon HD 5850’s in CrossFire at both the resolutions we tested it at. On our 24″ monitor at 1920 x 1200 resolution the difference was just 2% though. Adding a Radeon HD 5870 to a system with a Radeon HF 5850 provided an 80% performance though.