ATI Radeon 5850 & 5830 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 5850 and 5830 both offer fairly linear scaling, especially in widescreen. While 60fps isn't attainable in Eyefinity, it may be possible in widescreen with reduced settings.

Hitting 60fps

There is no hitting 60fps on any single card. With the HD 5850, I could only get in the 40's if I set it to 4800x900, turned off AA, stopped forcing DX11, turned off SSAO and set everything to medium. Battle Forge is simply a 30fps game in Eyefinity.