EA’s BattleForge is one of a few games which supports DirectX 10.1 when using Radeon 4000 series hardware. Now on 5870 launch day, it is the only title available with DirectX 11 support.
Support for DirectX 11 and technologies such as High Definition Screen Occlusion, Shader Model 5 and Compute Shader were added to the game on the 16th of September. By default the game will use Shader Model 5/DX11 rendering on the 5870, it can also be forced by editing the config file. HDAO can be enabled by setting the SSAO option to very high in the game menu, on the 5870 this also enables ComputeShader.
Like the DirectX 10.1 implementation on BattleForge the DX11 features are all aimed at improving performance, this is not a title which benefits from a large difference in visuals between modes.
So, looking at the performance we can see that at both tested resolutions the 4890 is able to outperform the GTX 285. On the multi-GPU setups the results are much closer with the 4870 CrossFire setup although at the maximum playable resolution the Radeon cards do perform better. The 5870 which is using DX11/HDAO in this test manages to outperform the 4890/GTX285 by over 10 frames per second at 1920x1200 with 4x anti-aliasing and overall provides the same gaming experience as the 4870 cards in CrossFire.
