ATI Radeon HD 5570 – Sub-$100 HTPC & Gaming Solution

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.

Judging from our results, the almost better comparison to the HD 5570 would be NVIDIA’s GT 240. The leader should belong to the green team for overall performance, but AMD has other perks on the side. Here, the HD 5570 wasn’t able to quite hit the GT 240, but considering that card is a tier above AMD’s card here, it’s quite impressive nonetheless.

Although I hate to go as low as 30 FPS in this game, we managed to retain the max detail settings and still keep our gameplay playable. Although Bound in Blood runs well on most any current mainstream GPU, lowering the settings makes for an ugly experience, so I have a hard time lowering it unless I absolutely have to.