ATI Radeon HD 5770 CrossFireX Performance

Five out of the seven current games we use for testing are either sequels, or titles in an established series. F.E.A.R. 2 is one of the former, following up on the very popular First Encounter Assault Recon, released in fall of 2005. This horror-based first-person shooter brought to the table fantastic graphics, ultra-smooth gameplay, the ability to blow massive chunks out of anything, and also a very fun multi-player mode.

Three-and-a-half years later, we saw the introduction of the game’s sequel, Project Origin. As we had hoped, this title improved on the original where gameplay and graphics were concerned, and it was a no-brainer to want to begin including it in our testing. The game is gorgeous, and there’s much destruction to be had (who doesn’t love blowing expensive vases to pieces?). The game is also rather heavily scripted, which aides in producing repeatable results in our benchmarking.

Manual Run-through: The level used for our testing here is the first in the game, about ten minutes in. The scene begins with a travel up an elevator, with a robust city landscape behind us. Our run-through begins with a quick look at this cityscape, and then we proceed through the level until the point when we reach the far door as seen in the above screenshot.

The perks of the HD 5770 flip-flop here a little bit, and there’s no true master. At 1680×1050, the single HD 5870 saw better performance over our CrossFireX setup (in all fairness, who’s going to notice the difference between 148 FPS and 169 FPS?). We saw the same thing happen at 2560×1600 as well, although the differences are minor, and both cards deliver great performance.

F.E.A.R. 2 might be a leading PC title where graphics are concerned, but it doesn’t require an ultra-powerful machine for a gamer to experience it at high-end settings. Thanks to this, all of our cards, ranging from $130 up to $500 are able to handle the game at the max detail settings. Better cards will make the game more fluid, of course, but none of these throttle gameplay at those settings.