ATI Radeon 5770 & 5750 Review - Battle Forge

Battle Forge is the free-to-play RTS from Electronic Arts. It offers a steampunk/fantasy RTS experience, where armies are build based on "decks" of cards similar to the Magic: The Gathering card game.

Battle Forge is one of ATI's spotlight (my terminology) games for the HD 5000 series cards, as it offers both DX11 and proper Eyefinity support. The game offers a number of DX11 features, and a wealth of options for tuning performance. Specifically, Battle Forge uses DX11 and Shader Model 5.0 to compute HighDefinition Ambient Occlusion (HDAO). For our tests we maxed out all of the settings and forced DX11 through the config.xml file.

The test is actually quite strenuous with the number of objects, effects and particles on the screen at one time. There is a noticeable performance increase as you scale across the cards, and then trend actually continues all the way across a pair of Eyefinity6 cards in CrossFireX.

Again the 5770 and 5750 both offer fairly linear scaling, especially in widescreen. 30fps isn't attainable in either widescreen or Eyefinity with all settings maxed. Playable framerates can be achieved with reduced settings.

Hitting 60fps

Widescreen - 50fps by reducing resolution to 1600x900, 0xAA, turned off DX11 and SSAO and set everything to Medium quality.

Eyefinity - 29fps by reducing the resolution to 4800x900 (3x1600x900) and using the above settings.