Performance in First-Person 3D Shooters

Call of Duty: World at War

Starting from version 1.3 the game allows to record and reproduce a demo. Unfortunately, this method does not report the bottom frame rate.

As expected, the senior model of the new series takes a good start, but starting from 1680x1050 it falls behind the Radeon HD 4890 due to lower memory bandwidth. This gap can only be bridged by overclocking. The new card’s results are high enough for comfortable play even at 2560x1600. We can also note that it is ahead of the GeForce GTX 275 at resolutions up to 2560x1600. That’s just incredible for a graphics card with a 128-bit memory interface, even though the memory is GDDR5.

The junior model is less confident but beats its previous-generation predecessor and delivers a good speed at 2560x1600. Overclocking makes it as fast as the Radeon HD 5770. Gamers with a limited budget should appreciate this.

Crysis Warhead

The Radeon HD 5870 is the only solution with acceptable performance at 1280x1024. The new RV830 Juniper based models are behind the GeForce GTX 275 at every resolution save for 2560x1600 where they somehow go ahead notwithstanding the 128-bit memory bus. The Radeon HD 4890 is obviously faster than the Radeon HD 5700 and the gap cannot be eliminated even through overclocking.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

We disabled the integrated frame rate limiter in the game console for the sake of comparing the cards. The game’s built-in benchmarking options do not provide information about the bottom speed, so there is no such info in the diagrams.

The game using MegaTexture technology, the graphics card’s memory bandwidth is crucial for its performance here. That’s why the Radeon HD 5770 cannot compete with the Radeon HD 4890 or GeForce GTX 275 even when overclocked. The junior model, Radeon HD 5750, is quite competitive to the Radeon HD 4770 and even better. Besides, the new cards are fast enough for comfortable play even at 2560x1600, especially as the game has an in-built frame rate limiter. Overclocking helps easily speed the junior model up to the senior model’s level.