ATI Radeon HD 5770 – DirectX 11 for the Masses

The Call of Duty series is one that needs no introduction. Although only six years old, CoD has already become a stature where both single-player and multi-player first-person shooters are concerned. From the series’ inception, each game has delivered stellar gameplay that totally engrosses you, thanks in part to creative levels, smart AI and realistic graphics.

World at War is officially the 5th game in the series, and while some hardcore fans claim that Treyarch is simply unable to deliver as high caliber a game as Infinity Ward, the title does do well to hold everyone over until Modern Warfare 2 hits (November 10, 2009). One perk is that World at War focuses on battles not exhausted in other war games, which helps to keep things fresh.

Manual Run-through: The level chosen for our testing is “Relentless”, one that depicts the Battle of Peleliu, which has American soldiers advance to capture an airstrip from the Japanese. The level is both exciting to play and incredibly hard on your graphics hardware, making it a perfect choice for our testing.

From a price/FPS perspective, the HD 5770 hasn’t blown our socks off, but the performance seen so far isn’t too bad. It’s much slower than the GTX 260, which retails for between $10 – $20 higher, and also slower than the HD 4870, which retails for about the same, if not $5 – $10 less. We’ll see if this continues throughout the rest of our performance testing, but for now, how’s our best playable setting?

When disabling our anti-aliasing, and also dropping the texture levels to normal, the HD 5770 begins to catch up to the HD 4870, falling short by only 2FPS, compared to ~5 FPS in our three main test settings above.