Performance

BattleForge

Our CPU can hardly be a bottleneck in this case limiting the performance. Nevertheless, the promised 10% performance gain in CrossFireX mode is there, although we could only achieve it in 1280x1024 resolution. In higher resolutions the gain was only 4-6%.

I would also like to say that we also registered a slight performance improvement for the single Radeon HD 4890: in 1280x1024 it sped up by about 7% and in more resource-hungry screen modes – by 4% at the most. The budget Radeon HD 4770, on the contrary, lost the same 4% of speed in the same resolution. Therefore, the owners of these graphics cards should think twice before upgrading their Catalyst driver with version 9.5, since the performance is already quite low and each frame counts.

Company of Heroes

During the tests in Company of Heroes we faced some problems. By default the game forces “vsync” option that is why maximum performance depends on the screen refresh rate, which is 60fps in our case. Theoretically, it can be disabled using “novsync” argument on RelicCoH.exe launch. However, every time we tried to do it, the game lost stability and crashed when we tried changing the resolution.

For the reasons mentioned above we couldn’t find out if the performance of Radeon HD 4890 CrossFireX tandem did in fact improve with Catalyst 9.5, but single-GPU graphics accelerators did show stable increase from 1% to 5%. Well, it is somewhat lower than the 10% ATI has promised us, however, our CPU is not one of those models that could limit the performance in this game and the 10% gain was promised for these particular processors. I would also like to point out slight increase of the minimal performance in low resolutions demonstrated by Radeon HD 4890. Nothing like that can be observed by Radeon HD 4770.