Introduction

Veni, vidi, vici (I came, I saw, I conquered) -- That all classic Latin phrase applied to ATI last week when they released the Radeon HD 5870 graphics card; the first ever DX11 class graphics card with a lot of features and raw brute horsepower to ensure you can play your games not only in the best quality, but also with a lot of performance headroom.

There is however one slight disadvantage with the Radeon HD 5870, its price tag. Surely everybody agrees that 399 USD might be a fair price for this all new 40nm GPU based graphics card, however... it's also a sum of money that most of us can't afford to spend, especially in these harsh economic times.

Well, ATI of course will address that issue with a truckload of graphics cards that will be cheaper. But in-between now and Christmas 2009 in the high-end segment two products will make an appearance. The dual-GPU based Radeon HD 5870 X2, which will be even more expensive, but there was another product launched last week that did not get enough attention as... well the cards had not been distributed just yet. That's right, it is of course the Radeon HD 5850.

As such today we'll look into the Radeon HD 5850, we'll check both the single GPU performance but also will check it out in CrossfireX multi-GPU mode. This card promises to go neck-to-neck with the 349 USD GeForce GTX 285 in terms of performance. The Radeon HD 5850 however comes with full DirectX 11 compatibility, Eyefinity and some sheer brutal rendering performance in both gaming and compute features. It's everything the Radeon HD 5870 really is, just a slight step slower but more affordable.

Meet that mean little sister of the Radeon HD 5870... The 259 USD Radeon HD 5850 1024MB.