XFX Radeon HD 5850 1GB GDDR5 Review

Tom Clancy’s Hawx (DX10 / 10.1)

Even though HawX has a built-in benchmarking tool, we found that it did not provide accurate enough results needed to reflect what actual in-game performance would be. Thus, we played through the first 6 minutes of a mission and recorded the results with FRAPS. All ATI cards have DX10.1 enabled.

1680 x 1050



1920 x 1200



2560 x 1600



The difference between the DX9 and DX10 / 10.1 settings is like night and day with all of the cards struggling to put up acceptable framerates at higher resolutions. Much like we are used to in this game, the HD 5850 struggles to post competitive minimum numbers particularly when AA is enabled even with the optimizations in DX10.1 working for it. Things begin to look better as the resolution increases.