ATI Radeon HD 5770 – DirectX 11 for the Masses

Like Call of Duty, Crysis is another series that doesn’t need much of an introduction. Thanks to the fact that almost any comments section for a PC performance-related article asks, “Can it run Crysis?”, even those who don’t play computer games no doubt know what Crysis is. When Crytek first released Far Cry, it delivered an incredible game engine with huge capabilities, and Crysis simply took things to the next level.

Although the sequel, Warhead, has been available for just about a year, it still manages to push the highest-end systems to their breaking-point. It wasn’t until this past January that we finally found a graphics solution to handle the game at 2560×1600 at its Enthusiast level, but even that was without AA! Something tells me Crysis will be de facto for GPU benchmarking for the next while.

Manual Run-through: Whenever we have a new game in-hand for benchmarking, we make every attempt to explore each level of the game to find out which is the most brutal towards our hardware. Ironically, after spending hours exploring this game’s levels, we found the first level in the game, “Ambush”, to be the hardest on the GPU, so we stuck with it for our testing. Our run starts from the beginning of the level and stops shortly after we reach the first bridge.

ATI might excel in Call of Juarez, but NVIDIA holds onto its crown in titles such as Crysis. Here, our HD 5770 came close once again to the HD 4870, but the GTX 260 kept a 5 – 10% performance lead.

Crysis is one of those unique gems that, even when run on a super high-end machine, still invokes the “Why won’t it run faster?!” spirit. So, for all configurations except the GTX 295 in SLI, we’re forced to drop the detail settings to “Mainstream”, which still happens to look quite good. And no, there is no typo. The HD 5770 really did average out to be 0.001 FPS slower than the HD 4870!