ATI Radeon HD 5830 – AMD Completes its HD 5000 Line-up

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 where we started, with the HD 5830 settling in between the GTX 260 and GTX 275.

I am not sure what it is, but like the HD 5850, this card doesn’t seem to handle this game at 2560×1600 too well. At first, it seemed to handle it fine, but the more I played, the more it tended to lag far randomly. As a result of that, our 1080p setting is what’s recommend for being best playable. I’m not sure exactly what the issue is, be it hardware or driver, but it’s existed for a while on just a couple HD 5000 cards.