ATI Radeon 5670, 5550 & 5450 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.

The 5670 and 5550 both offer fairly linear scaling in widescreen. The benchmark won't run on any of the Mainstream cards in Eyefinity. The 5450 only runs at 1680x1050, and then it's a slideshow.

Hitting 60fps

Turn everything down to Medium. Turn off SSAO. Turn off Cloud Shadows. Set 2xAA.
1920x1200 - 31fps
1680x1050 - 37fps

Turn everything down to Low, except Shadow Quality at Medium. Turn off SSAO. Turn off Cloud Shadows and Glow.
1920x1200 - 58fps
1680x1050 - 64fps