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Sapphire HD5850 Toxic 1GB Video Card Review

The events of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat unfold shortly after the end of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl following the ending in which Strelok destroys the C-Consciousness. Having discovered the open path to the Zone's center, the government decides to stage a large-scale operation to take control of the Chernobyl nuclear plant.

According to the operation's plan, the first military group is to conduct an air scouting of the territory to map the anomalous fields. Thereafter, making use of the maps, the main military forces are to be dispatched.

Despite thorough preparations, the operation fails. Most of the advanced helicopters crash. In order to collect information on the reasons for the operation's failure, Ukraine's Security Service send their agent (protagonist – Alexander Degtyarev) into the Zone. From now on everything depends on the player.

The player must traverse through the Zone and investigate the crash sites. As the player progresses he starts learning how the helicopters were shot down. The climax of the story begins when the player reaches Pripyat to find survivors of the helicopter crashes. The player eventually meets Strelok from the original S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game (Shadow of Chernobyl) and learns of the secrets behind the Zone.

This game uses the XRAY 1.6 Engine which allows for advanced graphics features through DX11 such as real time GPU tessellation. We set MSAA to 4x and enabled tessellation. Ambient Occlusion was also enabled.

The only card that remains fully playable at these settings is the 5870, however even with that we noticed some stuttering when moving from section to section – lowering the settings slightly would help to smooth this out for all the cards on test today.

During a particularly intensive section of gameplay we would class the performance as barely playable – to be fair however these settings are reserved normally for the extremely high end cards and we were pleased to see such solid performance throughout. The reference 5850 struggled in more locations than the Toxic edition due to the lower clock speeds.

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28 comments

  1. William Crawford

    Bloody Nora batman, thats one scary overclock ! I snagged those apps, thanks for the heads up

  2. I love Sapphires modded cards, those coolers rock my world. Wouldnt it be cool if AMD actually released these from now on with all their new mid/high end ranges?

  3. Absolutely no chance they would be on reference cards, they cost too much. I like the thinking though. Hey with the Intel story that was on here a few days ago and the new reference coolers they are looking at, maybe the whole industry is shifting views on this?

  4. Hats off to Sapphire again,was going to buy this but I held off for a bit even though I read a few good reviews about it. This is a wicked board. £230!! just ordered one

  5. £230 is a wicked price. the ordinary card is £240 in a local store here.

  6. Good price, would like to see CF figures for these. £460 for two of them, would be a good head to head against a GTX480 🙂

  7. I think the 480 GTX would get its ass handed to it, then some, but would be interesting for sho.

  8. I think the 5770 is better value though, ive seen some for £120 online, two of them would beat one of these.

  9. Anyone seen a good price for one of these in Canada?

  10. £349.99 on newegg http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102881&cm_re=hd5850_toxic-_-14-102-881-_-Product

  11. Canada? anyone know? best online place to buy?

  12. Great review, thanks KG

  13. Loved the review, thanks Gurus

  14. Sapphire are great, wish more makers would use vapor x style cooling.

  15. XFX are doing one which I think is sourced from the same company. check out this review. http://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/zardon/xfx-hd5870-black-edition-review/

  16. Julia Francisco

    Read this review last night and didnt have time to comment. Its a great product as many reviews have already testifed to. Was interesting personally to see the drain figures at the wall.

  17. not much stock available where I live. unfortunately as a bud of mine wants it.