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ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5850

ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5850

 

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.

ManufacturerATI
SeriesMobility Radeon HD 5800
CodenameBroadway-PRO
Pipelines800 - unified
Core Speed *625 MHz
Shader Speed *625 MHz
Memory Speed *2000 MHz
Memory Bus Width128 Bit
Memory TypeDDR3, GDDR3, GDDR5
Max. Amount of Memory1024 MB
Shared Memoryno
DirectXDirectX 11, Shader 5.0
Current Consumption39 Watt
technology40 nm
Features

Eyefinity (up to 6 displays), HD Audio (Dolby True HD, DTS HD), HDMI 1.3a, Avivo HD (UVD2.2)

Notebook Sizelarge
Date of Announcement07.01.2010
Information1.0 TFLOPS
Link to Manufacturer Pagehttp://www.amd.com/us/products/notebook/...
* The specified clock rates are only guidelines for the manufacturer and can be altered by them.

benchmarks

3DMark 06:
0% 100%
      min: 8546, avg: 9926, max: 12027 Points
... More Details

3DMark Vantage: - P Result no PhysX 1280x1024
0% 100%
      min: 5177, avg: 5199, max: 5221 Points
... More Details

- Range of benchmark values for this graphics card
- Average benchmark values for this graphics card
Based on 5 benchmarks

Game Benchmarks

The following benchmarks stem from our benchmarks of review laptops. The performance depends on the used graphics memory, clock rate, processor, system settings, drivers, and operating systems. So the results don't have to be representative for all laptops with this GPU. For detailled information on the benchmark results, click on the fps number.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (2010): Playable with a weaker graphics card in detail settings med.. - more...
CoD Modern Warfare 2 (2009): Playable with a weaker graphics card in detail settings high. - more...
Risen (2009): Playable with a weaker graphics card in detail settings low. - more...
Need for Speed Shift (2009): Playable with a weaker graphics card in detail settings med.. - more...
Colin McRae: DIRT 2 (2009): Playable with a weaker graphics card in detail settings med.. - more...
Anno 1404 (2009): Playable with a weaker graphics card in detail settings low. - more...
Sims 3 (2009): Playable with a weaker graphics card in detail settings high. - more...
F.E.A.R. 2 (2009): Playable with a weaker graphics card in detail settings high. - more...
GTA IV - Grand Theft Auto (2008): Playable with a weaker graphics card in detail settings med.. - more...
Left 4 Dead (2008): Playable with a weaker graphics card in detail settings high. - more...
Far Cry 2 (2008): Playable with a weaker graphics card in detail settings high. - more...
Crysis Warhead (2008): Playable with a weaker graphics card in detail settings low. - more...
Racedriver: GRID (2008): Playable with a weaker graphics card in detail settings high. - more...
Call of Duty 4 - Modern Warfare (2007): Playable with a weaker graphics card in detail settings high. - more...
Supreme Commander - FA Bench (2007): Playable with a weaker graphics card in detail settings high. - more...
Crysis - GPU Benchmark (2007): Playable with a weaker graphics card in detail settings med.. - more...
World in Conflict - Benchmark (2007): Playable with a weaker graphics card in detail settings low. - more...
Command and Conquer III (2007): Not playable with a weaker graphics card. - more...
Call of Juarez Benchmark (2006): Not playable with a weaker graphics card. - more...
The Elder Scrolls IV - Oblivion (2006): Playable with a weaker graphics card in detail settings high. - more...
Half Life 2 - Lost Coast Benchmark (2005): Playable with a weaker graphics card in detail settings high. - more...
F.E.A.R. (2005): Playable with a weaker graphics card in detail settings high. - more...
Quake 4 (2005): Playable with a weaker graphics card in detail settings ultra. - more...
World of Warcraft (2005): Playable with a weaker graphics card in detail settings med.. - more...
Counter-Strike Source (2004): Playable with a weaker graphics card in detail settings high. - more...
Doom 3 (2004): Playable with a weaker graphics card in detail settings ultra. - more...
Quake 3 Arena - Timedemo (1999): Playable with a weaker graphics card in detail settings high. - more...

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

Notebook reviews with ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5850 graphics card

Acer Aspire 8942G-728G128TWn (Intel Core i7 720QM, 18.4")
» Acer Aspire 8942G-728G128TWn - External Review

 

Author: Klaus Hinum (Update: 2010-02-15)