So....I saw a thread today glazing how "legendary" the HD 5850 was back in the day. I mean, it was a pretty high end GPU that was available for around $260. i think I got mine for closer to $300, but at $260, some are pointing out that that was only around $400 today. I mean, such a great GPU for only the equivalent of $400, or about the price you'd spend on a 5050 today. But did it provide as good of a value as GPUs today? Well, that's what we're gonna discuss.
GPUs then vs GPUs now
I gotta admit, I miss the GPU market of old, where you could buy a $260ish GPU and get something that was pretty premium. Back then, the market was different. You could get higher end products a lot more cheaply. But at the same time, the products aged far worse. Remember what I said, every 3 years, you'd roughly double GPU power for the money. The 5850 and its nvidia equivalent, the 460 were double what the legendary 8800 GT was. At the same time, 3 years later, we had the GTX 760 offer 2x the power the 5850 did, and by the time you got to 2016, you got the GTX 1060 and RX 480 offering 4x the performance for the price. The HD 5850 is basically equivalent to what the GT 1030 is today, except with less VRAM and less API support. But back in, say, 2010 when I got it, it was golden.
At the time, the HD 5850 was literally THE FOURTH SINGLE MOST POWERFUL GRAPHICS CARD ON THE PLANET! It actually seems more like a RX 9070 XT class product today, which currently goes for $800. The only cards that were better were the GTX 470, the GTX 480, and the HD 5870. And sure, Im excluding the dual cards like the GTX 295 (480 tier) and HD 5970 (two 5870s stacked together) here, but yeah. That's how the market was. And you got a pretty premium experience for the time.
Of course, let's talk about the differences in expectations then vs now. Back then, people roughed it a lot more with performance. Sure, the HD 5850 was capable of running games on high or ultra at the time, at say, 900p or 1080p, but keep in mind, those themselves were premium resolutions. There wasn't really 4k back then. THe really crazy people had 1440p setups and youd kinda NEED those aforementioned dual GPU setups to handle that. The 5850 could run battlefield bad company 2 at around 80 FPS with 2x MSAA at 900p in my experience. When I first got the card, I used a 1280x1024 CRT still, but quickly upgraded to a 900p monitor after that. It was a pretty high end experience for the time, but not really that premium now. Nowadays, you have 4k be the ultimate premium experience. 1440p is a kind of upper midrange experience, and most use 1080p. At the time, even 1080p seemed to be a premium experience. 900p was a bit more reasonable of a target and at the low end, there was 720p and CRT driven resolutions. It wasn't uncommon to, say, on a laptop, still run games at like 480p just to get a decent framerate.
Speaking of frame rates, let's discuss that too. 60 was a pretty premium experience back then too. Most monitors were 60hz and high refresh rate gaming wasn't really a thing. Consoles often ran games at 30 FPS with slowdown, at resolutions like 720p or even 540p at the time (keep in mind we're talking PS3/360 era here). So yeah, while the experience was premium, our expectations were much lower.
All in all, was the experience really any better than, say, my RX 6650 XT experience today? Actually...not really. The RX 6650 XT still handles 1080p on low settings at 60 FPS for the most part. And upscaling exists today, meaning when games run at those crazy low resolutions, upscalers tend to refine the image to be perceived as a higher resolution. It's not ideal, especially on AMD cards, but it's better than the blocky mess we had at the time. If anything, the 6650 XT has aged just as well if not better than the 5850, despite costing me about the same. Of course, at this rate, the 6650 XT is turning into one of those L E G E N D A R Y cards itself at this rate, especially with RAMpocalypse blowing out any gains the most recent series offered in price/performance.
How did the 5850 age?
With that said, let's have a realistic talk about how the 5850 aged. In 2010, it DID offer a premium experience. it ran most games on high settings at 60+FPS at the time. Some games like metro 2033 or crysis ran lower, but keep in mind, 30 FPS was considered acceptable. I think Crysis ran around 40 FPS on max settings, although i could get up to 100 out of it on low settings. This was on 1280x1024 resolution, although 900p tended to track similarly to these numbers IIRC. Battlefield bad company 2 ran at around 80 FPS on high with 2xMSAA, 4x was a little too demanding for it. COD Black Ops occasionally dipped into the 30s on max, but mostly held 60 and was regarded as heavily unoptimized for the time.
2011 was fairly good to it. By then, the HD 6000 and GTX 500 series was out and they kinda knocked it down a peg, but that was NORMAL back then. Games still ran well, with the only one that pushed it was Battlefield 3. That ran at around 40 FPS on like medium high settings. It looked mindblowing at the time. These days though, I'd just run it on like medium though and get 60 if I wanted to play but yeah, again, I was willing to reduce settings a bit more back then for higher quality settings. Crysis 2 actually ran better than Crysis 1, and ran around 40-50 FPS on high, although if I wanted 60 I could reduce settings too.
In 2012, it was officially more of a midrange card, or budget card if buying new. The HD 7770 or GTX 650 ti were its closest contemporaries, meaning it could be gotten for around $150 or something by this point. Again, it happened. Progress went on. By that point, the GTX 660 was trading blows with the GTX 580. By the end of the year, it was running games on medium, and Planetside 2 especially kinda put it in its place. Planetside 2 was the first truly "next gen" game back then offering large scale warfare on a level that brought virtually any system at the time to its knees. My phenom II would dip down into the 20s and the HD 5850 wasnt much better. At that point, a friend I played battlefield/planetside offered me a GTX 580, which I gladly accepted. it didnt help the CPU bottlenecks I had but I did stop using the 5850 after that.
Well...outside of when it died. The 580 he gave me eventually started artifacting and crashing, and I RMAed it to EVGA who offered a generous guest warranty. But then it died...again. And they upgraded me to a GTX 760. And then THAT died, and I got another 760, which I used until it finally died in 2017, when I upgraded to my GTX 1060.
With that said, I did have to keep pulling out "ol reliable" to tide me over between RMAs, and I did continue to test it. 2012 titles mostly ran on medium on it. By 2013 and 2014, it was relegated to low settings, but still it felt good to use. It didn't finally hit its breaking point until it hit 2015 era titles. It was a double blow. AMD stopped supporting drivers for it in 2015, and the 1 GB VRAM made playing new titles painful. By this point it was getting like 30 FPS at like 720p, the bare minimum for play.
I even popped it in one last time in 2017 when waiting for my GTX 1060, which took a month to ship because hey, guess what, this wasnt the only GPU shortage we ever had. And I got in at the right time too, I got it close to MSRP, if I bought just a month or two later, I been faced with eyewatering $600 prices for the 1060. But yeah, by 2017 it wasnt a good experience. To give you an idea:
Overwatch- Ran fine
Rainbow six siege: 25-30 FPS, 720p
Doom 2016: 60 FPS....at 640x480p
Fallout 4: 40 FPS at 720p
Battlefield 1: wouldnt launch
PUBG: a stuttery sub 30 mess, but then I lucked out when the 1.0 release led to a massive optimization patch, which bumped me up to 30-50 FPS 720p.
Mass effect andromeda: like 20-30 FPS at some awful resolution that made it look like crap (probably 480p).
Like, YIKES, it was awful. Of course, by this point, it was a 7 year old card. And it was basically on par with a 1030, except the 1030 had 2 GB VRAM and modern driver support so that was actually BETTER. And yeah, a lot of titles wouldnt even boot at all if I recall.
Compared to the GTX 760 / 1060 / RX 6650 XT
The 760 aged similarly to the 5850. Maybe a little better overall, minus dying. By the time I stopped using it the 760 was still holding up, running new titles on low/medium, although wolfenstein the new colossus did push it to the point I was having to run at a low resolution at unstable frame rates due to the 4 GB VRAM requirement. But still, it mostly handled 900p like a champ. And given it released in 2013, it was basically in its 2014 era equivalent to the 5850, and performed...roughly the same.
The GTX 1060 set the standard for $250 or so cards though. It released in 2016, and didn't show its age until 2023 or so. By 2020 and 2021, it was running games on low-medium with FSR on, so it was kinda being relegated to 720p, but it could handle it like a champ. When I stopped using it, games like Modern Warfare II started pushing it a bit, where I was getting 40-70 FPS on low 720p, and I know the 2023 releases like dead space and starfield basically crushed it. So that also lasted about 5 years, given I used it in 2016, although I started using it late into its actual life cycle and relative terms, and bought it as a necessity, given the 760 died and the 5850 wasnt cutting it by 2017. It actually aged the best of all of them thus far, although to be fair, that's also where the performance gains started slowing down. I honestly though the 1060 was gonna be a 3 year card for me, not the 5 year monster it was. It really held the line through the COVID pandemic, until late 2022 when I finally could finally afford a reasonable upgrade.
Likewise, the 6650 XT I also expected to be kind of a temporary card. I figured the 8 GB VRAM would hold it back, and I had a tentative upgrade window from 2025 to 2027. So I would, in a normal market, consider upgrading. Still, due to the fact that it kinda set the standard for the new normal and it took until 2025 just to see any performance gains at all and even then, we didn't REALLY get any performance gains since the prices went up again, and new cards STILL use 8 GB VRAM in this now "budget" price range, I dont really expect the card to stop any time soon. It does feel aged. it does only run new titles on low-medium 1080p like I'd expect a 3-4 year old budget card to do, but without a VRAM boost, or any new APIs that the 6650 XT lacks, the card will likely keep chugging along. I hope to replace it by 2028, although given the current...mess screwing up the market, we might not even see a 6060 or AMD equivalent until 2029. So that's looking like the time to upgrade. With that said, the 6650 XT will be 7 years old by then, the longest lasting card yet. Will it still be game ready by then? Who knows. I kinda half expect games to put out BS unrealistic requirements by the end of next year that require like 12 GB VRAM or some crap like that. Even though that will screw over all of the 5060 users and the like too. Idk, requirements are weird, and I fear these guys just wont care if there isnt an affordable replacement for older hardware.
I guess that's the challenge of our time. Again, the market is different. By the time you hit 2014-2015, you could upgrade to a GTX 970 for around $330, or if you made it to 2016, you could buy a 1060 6 GB for $250ish. Those kinds of cards were 3-4x better than the 5850, with 4-6x the VRAM. The modern equivalent to that would be a 5090 which is....well, let's just say at this rate the RTX $5090 memes are UNDERselling it by like $2000.
Conclusion
So...final prognosis on the 5850? I mean, all things considered, back then it was premium, today, such a product would be budget. It really wasn't any more premium than any "60" tier card I've used, like a 760, or 1060, or 6650 XT, and if anything, of the 4, it aged on par or maybe a little worse. That is mostly not the card's fault. Some of it was AMD's lack of driver support, yeah, but back then, tech just advanced a lot more rapidly and the play really was to just pay enough to get a good experience to tide you over a few years and then jump to the next thing which would be like 4x better by then. The reason we have more longevity now is in part because things have slowed down a lot since then, meaning hardware lasts a bit longer. Even then, the 5850 still had only a slightly shorter usable lifespan than the GTX 1060, another L E G E N D A R Y tier product. It lasted about as long as the 760 did, maybe a little less as well. And vs the 4 year old RX 6650 XT I use? Same story. Low settings at my target resolution after 4 years. That's about normal.
Of course, back then, the standards were lower. Back then, 1080p/60 FPS was a premium experience, equivalent to 1440p/120 FPS today. Nowadays, we look at 1080p/60 FPS like we look at 720p/30 FPS, like it's just kinda the bare minimum to get the game running, with less being considered "unplayable."
And even then, looking back, I DID settle for a relatively choppy 45 FPS or so in a lot of games that in the modern era I would find unacceptable. heck, since getting the 7700k CPU, I basically refused to game at less than 60 FPS mostly. A dip here and there wasnt the end of the world, but a constant sub 60 FPS experience is just miserable to me now. So the standard IS higher.
With all of that said, barring rampocalypse, does $250 or so really get you less of a GPU than you did in the past? Well, it kinda depends. The market is a lot more unstable today, with random booms causing GPU prices to get haywire, and with the true budget market being eliminated. Like, back in the day, keep in mind what I said, even a $150ish GPU gave a good experience. People back then often used a HD 5770 which was a pretty respectable card, or a GTS 450. They used stuff like 750 tis, 1050 tis, and 1650 supers. And you just cant even get a card like that any more for less than $200. If youre lucky you'll get some Arc A380 which still offers around 1650 tier performance for around 1650 prices. And the HD 5850's performance is basically still available in the form of the GT 1030 for $100. Kinda ridiculous to spend $100 on what is now a 17 year old $260 GPU equivalent. Kinda like spending $100 on something from 1992 in 2009. Crazy.
Anyway, this is why, when I did my GPU tiers, I considered the HD 5850 and GTX 400 series to be A tier. It wasnt quite S tier IMO. It lasted about a year or two less than TRULY legendary S tier GPUs, but it held up pretty well and if you bought one in 2010 like I did, you were set through 2014, with the performance only becoming too old and borderline in 2015 titles.
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