ATI Radeon HD 5770 CrossFireX Performance

If you look up the definition for “controversy”, Grand Theft Auto should be listed. If it’s not, then that should be a crime, because throughout GTA’s many titles, there’s been more of that than you can shake your fist at. At the series’ beginning, the games were rather simple, and didn’t stir up too much passion in certain opposers. But once GTA III and its successors came along, its developers enjoyed all the controversy that came their way, and why not? It helped spur incredible sales numbers.

Grand Theft Auto IV is yet another continuation in the series, though it follows no storyline from the previous titles. Liberty City, loosely based off of New York City, is absolutely huge, with much to explore. This is so much so the case, that you could literally spend hours just wandering around, ignoring the game’s missions, if you wanted to. It also happens to be incredibly stressful on today’s computer hardware, similar to Crysis.

Manual Run-through: After the first minor mission in the game, you reach an apartment. Our benchmarking run starts from within this room. From here, we run out the door, down the stairs and into an awaiting car. We then follow a specific path through the city, driving for about three minutes total.

We’re back to seeing the CrossFireX configuration take the top spot, and this is one instance where I didn’t expect things to go well. Grand Theft Auto IV is a true beast of a game, and finicky at best, so I was impressed to see it handle multi-GPU scaling so well. Great results overall.

Thanks to its great performance, the CrossFireX HD 5770’s joined the ranks of the HD 5870 and NVIDIA’s GTX 295 and could handle the game at slightly higher details than our normally-benchmarked configurations.