Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 Toxic

If you look up the definition for “controversy”, Grand Theft Auto should be listed. If it’s not, then that should be a crime, because throughout GTA’s many titles, there’s been more of that than you can shake your fist at. At the series’ beginning, the games were rather simple, and didn’t stir up too much passion in certain opposers. But once GTA III and its successors came along, its developers enjoyed all the controversy that came their way, and why not? It helped spur incredible sales numbers.

Grand Theft Auto IV is yet another continuation in the series, though it follows no storyline from the previous titles. Liberty City, loosely based off of New York City, is absolutely huge, with much to explore. This is so much so the case, that you could literally spend hours just wandering around, ignoring the game’s missions, if you wanted to. It also happens to be incredibly stressful on today’s computer hardware, similar to Crysis.

Manual Run-through: After the first minor mission in the game, you reach an apartment. Our benchmarking run starts from within this room. From here, we run out the door, down the stairs and into an awaiting car. We then follow a specific path through the city, driving for about three minutes total.

Up until this point, the Toxic version of the card came well above the reference version, but that ends here. I think I have a reason, though. Back in November, a patch for the game was released, and as a result, I believe something caused the performance to decrease just a wee bit on these cards. Therefore, the Toxic, despite being faster, places below the reference card here.

In our original HD 5850 review, we mentioned that we had a stuttery experience with that card in particular with GTA IV at 2560×1600, and that’s something that hasn’t changed. It’s truly bizarre to me, because this is the only model HD 5000 that happens to do this at that resolution. So because of that, our best playable is forced to be 1080p. Fortunately, GTA IV isn’t exactly a “must have” title for the PC.