by Rob Williams on December 16, 2009 in Graphics & Displays
Of all the current mid-range graphics cards on the market, the Radeon HD 5770 from AMD has proven to be one of the best. It offers great performance, and has other perks such as DirectX 11 and Eyefinity support. With its Vapor-X model, Sapphire has improved the card in numerous ways, including power consumption and temperatures.
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.
More of the same here. The performance couldn’t get much closer between the two cards than this.
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NVIDIA GTX 295 1792MB (Reference)
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2560×1600 – Gamer, 0xAA
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19
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40.381
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ATI HD 5870 1GB (Reference)
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2560×1600 – Gamer, 0xAA
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20
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32.955
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ATI HD 5850 1GB (ASUS)
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2560×1600 – Mainstream, 0xAA
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28
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52.105
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NVIDIA GTX 285 1GB (EVGA)
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2560×1600 – Mainstream, 0xAA
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27
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50.073
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NVIDIA GTX 275 896MB (Reference)
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2560×1600 – Mainstream, 0xAA
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24
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47.758
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NVIDIA GTX 260 896MB (XFX)
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2560×1600 – Mainstream, 0xAA
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21
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40.501
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ATI HD 4890 1GB (Sapphire)
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2560×1600 – Mainstream, 0xAA
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19
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39.096
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ATI HD 4870 1GB (Reference)
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2560×1600 – Mainstream, 0xAA
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20
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35.257
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ATI HD 5770 1GB (Vapor-X)
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2560×1600 – Mainstream, 0xAA
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19
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35.923
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ATI HD 5770 1GB (Reference)
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2560×1600 – Mainstream, 0xAA
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20
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35.256
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NVIDIA GTX 250 1GB (EVGA)
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2560×1600 – Mainstream, 0xAA
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18
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34.475
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ATI HD 5750 1GB (Sapphire)
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1920×1080 – Mainstream, 0xAA
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21
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47.545
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Gamer is for the most hardcore cards out there, which the HD 5770 isn’t. So, we had to back down our detail profile to Mainstream, which delivered very playable framerates.