ATI Radeon HD 5770 – DirectX 11 for the Masses

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by Rob Williams on October 13, 2009 in Graphics & Displays

AMD may have released its first Evergreen GPUs mere weeks ago, but don’t think it’s slowing down for anybody. The company has followed-up with its first mid-range parts, belonging to the HD 5700 series. Performance is much more modest on these new cards, but no features have been scrapped. It’s all here… DirectX 11, Eyefinity and more.

Page 9 – Race Driver: GRID

If you primarily play games on a console, your choices for quality racing games are plenty. On the PC, that’s not so much the case. While there are a good number, there aren’t enough for a given type of racing game, from sim, to arcade. So when Race Driver: GRID first saw its release, many gamers were excited, and for good reason. It’s not a sim in the truest sense of the word, but it’s certainly not arcade, either. It’s somewhere in between.

The game happens to be great fun, though, and similar to console games like Project Gotham Racing, you need a lot of skill to succeed at the game’s default difficulty level. And like most great racing games, GRID happens to look absolutely stellar, and each of the game’s locations look very similar to their real-world counterparts. All in all, no racing fan should ignore this one.

Manual Run-through: For our testing here, we choose the city where both Snoop Dogg and Sublime hit their fame, the LBC, also known as Long Beach City. We choose this level because it’s not overly difficult, and also because it’s simply nice to look at. Our run consists of an entire 2-lap race, with the cars behind us for almost the entire race.

GRID is one game that favors ATI cards, but that didn’t matter too much here as the GTX 260 still managed to beat it out, except in the top-end. But despite that, the results from all of our tested cards is good, and with the HD 5770 achieving almost 60 FPS at 2560×1600 with 4xAA, we’re doubtful too many people will be complaining.

Graphics Card
Best Playable
Min FPS
Avg. FPS
NVIDIA GTX 295 1792MB (Reference)
2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
82
101.690
ATI HD 4890 1GB (Sapphire)
2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
57
70.797
NVIDIA GTX 285 1GB (EVGA)
2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
54
66.042
NVIDIA GTX 275 896MB (Reference)
2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
52
63.617
ATI HD 4870 1GB (Reference)
2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
51
63.412
ATI HD 5770 1GB (Reference)
2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
45
56.980
NVIDIA GTX 260 896MB (XFX)
2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
45
54.809
NVIDIA GTX 250 1GB (EVGA)
2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA
35
43.663
ATI HD 4770 512MB (Gigabyte)
1920×1080 – Max Detail, 4xAA
55
69.403

If it works, don’t mess with it, and that’s a good mantra to live by with GRID. The game runs well regardless of the settings you use (assuming you don’t push anti-aliasing higher than 4x), so 2560×1600 with maxed settings is our best playable.

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Rob Williams

Rob founded Techgage in 2005 to be an 'Advocate of the consumer', focusing on fair reviews and keeping people apprised of news in the tech world. Catering to both enthusiasts and businesses alike; from desktop gaming to professional workstations, and all the supporting software.

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