AMD’s HD 5550 & 5570 – Now Equipped with GDDR5 Goodness

When the original Call of Juarez was released, it brought forth something unique… a western-styled first-person shooter. That’s simply not something we see too often, so for fans of the genre, its release was a real treat. Although it didn’t really offer the best gameplay we’ve seen from a recent FPS title, its storyline and unique style made it well-worth testing.

After we retired the original title from our suite, we anxiously awaited for the sequel, Bound in Blood, in hopes that the series could be re-introduced into our testing once again. Thankfully, it could, thanks in part to its fantastic graphics, which are based around the Chrome Engine 4, and improved gameplay of the original. It was also well-received by game reviewers, which is always a good sign.

Manual Run-through: The level chosen here is Chapter I, and our starting point is about 15 minutes into the mission, where we stand atop a hill that overlooks a large river. We make our way across the hill and ultimately through a large trench, and we stop our benchmarking run shortly after we blow up a gas-filled barrel.

The performance increases continue here, with almost identical gains to what we saw with Modern Warfare 2. Although it’s not that surprising, it’s still rather incredible to me that with a simple memory change, we boosted our 20 FPS on the HD 5550 to 36 FPS at 1680×1050. Given that these cards are set to cost the same as the older models, that’s quite a nice free gain. Even overclocking isn’t that effective!

In another repeat, both the HD 5570 cards shared identical settings, but the GDDR5 version delivered a sweet 9 FPS boost. The GDDR5 HD 5550 gave us the ability again to increase the graphical detail but retain near-identical framerates.