Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 Xtreme 1GB Review

While Futuremark is a well-established name where PC benchmarking is concerned, Unigine is just beginning to become exposed to people. The company’s main focus isn’t benchmarks, but rather its cross-platform game engine which it licenses out to other developers, and also its own games, such as a gorgeous post-apocalytic oil strategy game. The company’s benchmarks are simply a by-product of its game engine.

The biggest reason that the company’s “Heaven” benchmark grew in popularity rather quickly is that both AMD and NVIDIA promoted it for its heavy use of tessellation, a key DirectX 11 feature. Like 3DMark Vantage, the benchmark here is overkill by design, so results here aren’t going to directly correlate with real gameplay. Rather, they showcase which card models can better handle both DX11 and its GPU-bogging features.

A ha! We finally run into a test where we can see the HD 5850 falling short of the HD 6850. With AMD’s HD 6000 series, major considerations were taken with regards to tessellation performance, and the results of that work are made evident here. But, compared to the HD 6790 and GTX 550 Ti, the Xtreme still comes out well ahead.