ATI Radeon 5870 Eyefinity6 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 in moving to the 2GB frame buffer of the E6. The dual GPUs in the 5970 generally offer better performance that either single GPU card. However, pairing two GPUs each to 2GB of VRAM shows obvious performance improvements over the 5970.

Hitting 60fps

Setting AA to 2x, and setting Shadow Quality, SSAO and FX Quality at High (from Very High) will get you 30fps in Battle Forge. I could only get in the 40's if I set it to 4800x900, turned off AA, stopped forcing DX11, turned off SSAO and set everything to medium. Battle Forge is simply a 30fps game in Eyefinity.