The ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5850 is a high-end DirectX 11 capable graphics card for laptops / notebooks by AMD. Technically the HD5850 is a 11% slower clocked Mobility Radeon HD 5870 and therefore also based on the desktop HD 5770 (RV840) chip with slower clock rates. 

The memory interface of the Mobility 5850 is composed out of two 64 bit wide controllers leading to a 128 bit memory bus that can access up to 1024 MB of DDR3 or GDDR5 memory (512 MB GDDR3). If (G)DDR3 is used by the laptop vendor the performance clearly suffers noticable.

The 5850 offers 800 MADD cores (called Stream Processors) which are grouped in 160 5-dimensional groups. The cores support DirectX 11 functions in hardware (Tessellation, OIT, Post-Processing, Shadows, HDR Texture Compression). Furthermore, 16 ROPs, 40TMUs, and 40 TAUs can be found on the chip. All in all 1040 Mio transistors offer a theroretic computation power of up to 1.12 TFLOPS. 

According to AMD, the HD 5000 series was also improved regarding general computing (as the HD4000 series was not optimized for this). Therefore, the performance of ATI stream, OpenCL, and DirectCompute 11 applications should be noticable better.

The 3D performance of the Mobility HD 5850 depends heavily on the used graphics ram. As long as fast GDDR5 is used, the performance should be between a GeForce GTX 260M - 280M in the high end segment. Therefore, all current games (2009) should be playable in high details with high resolutions. With DDR3 memory the performance should drop noticeably because of the 128 Bit wide memory bus. Which games run fluently and detailled benchmarks can be found on the lower section of this page (permanently maintained). First performance tests by twisted-reviews.com of an Acer Aspire 8942G which is equipped with DDR3 graphics memory show only scores on a level of a GeForce GTS 160M.

The Mobility Radeon HD 5000 series includes an improved video processor (UVD2) to decode HD videos with the graphic card. The new version is able to decode two HD streams simultaneously (e.g., for Blu-Ray picture in picture) if the graphic card offers enough memory bandwidth (only GDDR5 versions?). Since the Flash 10.1 Beta, the 5000 series is also able to help accelerate Flash HD videos (like YouTube).

A special feature of the HD 5000 series is its ability to transmit HD audio formats (like Dolby True HD or DTS HD Master Audio) with up to 8 channels and 192 KHz / 24 Bit over HDMI 1.3a.

As the desktop HD 5000 series, the Mobility HD 5850 also supports Eyefinity to connect up to 6 monitors to the graphics chip. Of course, this depends on how many monitor outputs the laptop vendor adds to the laptop (and how they are wired). Most laptops will support three screens simultaneously (internal and two external).

Due to the high power consumption of the Mobility Radeon HD 5850 (40-60 Watt of the 5800 series), it is only suited for large laptops with good (and possibly loud) cooling solutions. According to AMD, the performance per watt ratio (same power consumption, better performance) and the Idle power consumption were improved (thanks to Memory Clock Scaling and Clock Gating). Furthermore, the chip does support PowerXpress (with AMD chipset) and Switchable Graphics (Intel) to switch between the dedicated and chipset / CPU graphics card (with improved switching times).

Compared to desktop graphics cards, the Mobility Radeon HD 5850 should perform slower than a Radeon HD 5750 due to the slow clock rate.

For more games that might be playable and a list of all games and graphics cards visit our Gaming List