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

When the original Call of Duty game launched in 2003, Infinity Ward was an unknown. Naturally… it was the company’s first title. But since then, the series and company alike have become household names. Not only has the series delivered consistently incredible gameplay, it’s pushed the graphics envelope with each successive release, and where Modern Warfare is concerned, it’s also had a rich storyline.

The first two titles might have been built on the already-outdated Quake III engine, but since then, the games have been built with improved graphical features, capable of pushing the highest-end PCs out there. Modern Warfare 2 is the first such exception, as it’s more of a console port than a true PC title. Therefore, the game doesn’t push PC hardware as much as we’d like to see, but despite that, it still looks great, and lacks little in the graphics department. You can read our review of the game here.

Manual Run-through: The level chosen is the 10th mission in the game, “The Gulag”. Our teams fly in helicopters up to an old prison with the intention of getting closer to finding the game’s villain, Vladimir Makarov. Our saved game file begins us at the point when the level name comes on the screen, right before we reach the prison, and it ends after one minute of landing, following the normal progression of the level. The entire run takes around two-and-a-half minutes.

It’s no secret that the main bottleneck on lower-end cards is the memory, but our GDDR5 results prove just how much of a bottleneck it truly is. The HD 5550 in particular saw a 75% performance boost just because of its move to faster memory. The difference between the HD 5570 cards weren’t quite as stark, but was still a nice gain at around 20%.

The benefit of GDDR5 on these cards is huge, and again reiterated in our best playable results. Again singling out the HD 5550, we were able to not only increase the detail level, but also enable anti-aliasing. In the end, the performance is almost the same, but the detail level is much improved on the GDDR5 card.

Because our graphics levels are already maxed out on the non-GDDR5 card, we couldn’t increase them further there, but we still saw a nice performance boost.