Benchmarks: Unreal Tournament 3, Batman Arkham Asylum
While the Radeon HD 4870 X2 and Radeon HD 5770 Crossfire both showed impressive gains over their single GPU counterparts, the new Radeon HD 5970 struggled to outpace the Radeon HD 5870.
At 2560x1600 it was just 10% faster, which is a bit worrying considering how the game's engine has typically worked well with Crossfire technology. Hopefully this won't become a trend throughout the rest of our tests.
Batman Arkham Asylum is a controversial game to benchmark with, as anti-aliasing in this game strongly favors Nvidia based graphics cards. By removing this visual setting the problem is easily eliminated, though it brings about another small problem: even at 2560x1600 mid-range graphics cards are not exactly put to the test.
The game is also based on the aging Unreal Engine 3, though it is said to use the 3.5 version which features a few upgrades. Still, this shouldn't provide much trouble for the Radeon HD 5970.
Despite not being a particularly demanding game, Batman Arkham Asylum should demonstrate how various graphics cards scale using this engine – and the Radeon HD 5970 cleans up. At the maximum tested resolution the Radeon HD 5970 is 27% faster than the GeForce GTX 295 and 58% faster than the Radeon HD 5870. Obviously with an average of 168fps the Radeon HD 5970 has no problems with Batman Arkham Asylum using maximum in-game quality settings with AA/AF disabled.