by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko
07/08/2009 | 01:32 PM
It may seem that system requirements of video games are growing at a tremendous rate. The GeForce 8800 GTX used to be the acme of technology just yesterday but today some games are not fast even on a platform with a Core i7 processor and a dual-chip GeForce GTX 295 or Radeon HD 4870 X2. It may also seem that system requirements are growing up much faster than the level of detail and graphics quality of game worlds. Much can be said in favor or against that point, but we will put this argument aside for once. Today, we won’t talk about the highs and lows of a particular gaming platform. Instead, we will take a look at a highly popular genre of games that does not put such a strong emphasis on visuals. We mean massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). Their success is easy to explain. People want to play and it is always more exciting to play with or against other people rather than to sweep out computer-controlled monsters. A MMORPG gives this opportunity, putting the player into a world populated with hundreds and thousands of characters controlled by real persons where one can live a rich virtual life.
Contrary to the common opinion, this genre was born quite a long time ago, its precursor being a simple 3D shooter Maze War adapted in 1974 for multiplayer on the Arpanet. Closer to the basics of the genre are MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) games that had inherited most of the traits of the popular table gaming system Dungeons and Dragons. Although MUDs had no graphics and offered a text-based interface only, they were true predecessors of today’s MMORPGs. The first commercial MMORPG was Island of Kesmai released in 1985 by the CompuServe service. It supported up to a hundred gamers simultaneously. Neverwinter Nights was the first game of that class to be graphical. However, such games relied on special services instead of the Internet and this fact limited their distribution. The first wave of MMORPGs as we know them today came from 1996 till 1999 and the most popular title was Ultima Online. This game has quite a lot of admirers even now.
Today, this is a well-established million-dollar industry with a crowd of clients. World of Warcraft alone has over 11 million subscribers. A study of the cultural layer created by MMORPGs can provide enough material for dozens of scientific articles. This genre is often criticized and compared with drugs. Indeed, there are known cases of players dying through a few gaming days’ exhaustion or murdering other players in the real world for some offence in the virtual reality. We won’t talk morals here. We just state the fact that MMORPGs are a huge phenomenon in the gaming world that attracts numerous players and penetrates into the real life as well.
MMORPGs offer a wide choice of gaming universes to choose from. They come in various styles: fantasy, science fiction and many others. Since it is your computer that serves as the window into the virtual world, you want to know what system configuration is needed to experience it fully. As a rule, MMORPGs are developed for a broad audience with different PCs and their developers try to keep the project’s hardware requirements within reasonable limits. Besides, many popular MMORPGs were released years ago and modern top-performance graphics cards have no problems with them.
This is the general notion about online games, but we want to check it out by benchmarking a few modern graphics cards priced from $50-80 to $200-250 in a few popular MMORPGs. Again, the point of such games is not in eye-popping visuals but rather in the opportunity to interact with other players. Therefore a MMORPG gamer may appreciate an inexpensive card with passive cooling, especially as many such gamers play at nights and want to have a quiet computer nearby. We have got one such solution in our hands just in time for this review. It is called Sapphire HD 4670 Ultimate Edition. Let’s take a look at this interesting card before we proceed to the tests.
Sapphire HD 4670 Ultimate Edition is shipped in a relatively small cardboard box with light-colored design. It looks pretty attractive, even though the design theme is quite common:
A large Stylized head with a headset and the word “Ultimate” suggest that this is a silent product targeted primarily for HTPC segment. The video memory size and type are indicated correctly. There is an additional sticker that tells you about a native HDMI port, which is another indication of the positioning of Sapphire HD 4670 Ultimate Edition for multimedia application.
The package is of impeccable quality: behind a bright-colored slip-cover you find a box of thick brown cardboard holding a plastic molded tray. The graphics accelerator sits securely inside one of the tray sections. The tray is covered with a polyurethane foam sheet. Besides the card itself, you also get the following accessories with it:
There are no cables or adapters bundled with Sapphire HD 4670 Ultimate Edition, but you actually do not need any of them. First, the card is powered solely from the PCI Express x16 slot. And second, it is equipped with a native HDMI port and thus requires no adapters of any kind.
The bundled software is worth paying special attention to, because it corresponds fully to the positioning of this graphics solution in the market. However, in reality the PowerDVD version included with the card doesn’t support contemporary HD video formats. Although, I don’t think we can complain about it, since Sapphire HD 4670 Ultimate Edition is a mainstream graphics accelerator and having the latest and hence more expensive version of the HD video player could have increased its end price and hence affected the popularity of this solution in the market.
AMD Ruby ROM Volume 1.1 disk serves mostly marketing purposes, because it contains company branded wallpapers and screensavers for your desktop, demo versions of several games and software applications, and a full version of Dungeon Runners online RPG.
Overall, Sapphire HD 4670 Ultimate Edition gets a high score for the packaging design as well as quality. As for the accessories bundle it is a little harder to shape up the final verdict here: although it is not very rich, you have to keep in mind that this product is an inexpensive solution, and accessories bundled like that are acceptable for the products from this price segment.
The Sapphire HD 4670 Ultimate Edition is the same size as the reference Radeon HD 4670 GDDR3 but that’s where the similarity ends. It uses a different PCB that differs from the reference PCB in everything including the color of the solder mask. Blue is quite a standard color for Sapphire’s products, though.
The PCB is rather simple because of the 128-bit memory bus and the lack of external power connection. The GPU and memory voltage regulators are simple, too. The former has a 2-phase design with two power transistors in each phase and the option of adding one more transistor into each phase using the empty seats on the reverse side of the PCB. An unknown chip marked as BN-AK DOU serves as a PWM controller.
A simple single-phase regulator controlled by a NeXsem NX2114 chip is responsible for the memory chips.
The peak power consumption of a reference Radeon HD 4670 is not higher than 50 watts, so there is no need for an additional power connector. The card’s power requirements are satisfied by the power section of the PCI Express x16 slot.
There are eight GDDR3 chips on the PCB – four on each side of it. The chips are marked as Hynix H5RS5223CFR-N0C. According to the manufacturer, this means a capacity of 512 Mb (16 Mb x 32). The N0C suffix says that the chips have an increased voltage (2.05 V) and a rated frequency of 1000 (2000) MHz. The total amount of local graphics memory is 512 megabytes, which is standard even for today’s inexpensive graphics cards.
The memory frequency of the HD 4670 Ultimate Edition is reduced to 873 (1746) MHz, suggesting that Sapphire does not position this product as a gaming solution. The reduction of operating frequencies is always good for a card with passive cooling. The downside is that, considering the 128-bit bus, the card’s memory bandwidth is only 27.9 GBps, which may have a negative effect on its performance in games. However, the card’s memory could work at 1000 (2000) MHz when overclocked, and we used such overclocking in order to emulate a reference Radeon HD 4670.
The RV730 processor installed on this card was manufactured on the 49th week of 2008, in early December. Its memory controller is set up for working with GDDR3. The core frequency is 750 MHz, like that of the reference card. The GPU has a standard configuration with 64 unified superscalar processors (5 ALUs in each), 32 texture processors, and 8 RBEs. As opposed to the RV770, there is no metallic frame on the die package and the die itself is placed at an angle of 45 degrees. Overclocking was unrewarding: the GPU failed to work at 770 MHz, being only stable at 764 MHz. We did not benchmark the card at the overclocked frequencies.
The Sapphire HD 4670 Ultimate Edition has a dedicated D-Sub port although this feature is rather useless nowadays (a monitor with D-Sub interface can be connected via an adapter). Two DVI-I ports would be more appropriate for dual-monitor configurations. This graphics card seems to be targeted at the HTPC market, so the dedicated HDMI port is an advantage.
Although this graphics card has no CrossFire connectors, it can work in multi-GPU mode, exchanging data via the PCI Express bus (of course, this worsens the performance of such a tandem somewhat). To build such a tandem you need a second such card and a mainboard with a PCI Express controller that supports peer-to-peer data transfer mode. In other words, you will not be able to pair a Sapphire HD 4670 Ultimate Edition with an ordinary Radeon HD 4670 that has CrossFireX connectors. The multi-GPU mode will not be available on mainboards based on Intel’s P35 and P965 chipsets which do not support peer-to-peer mode for PCI Express devices. This is hardly a serious drawback, though. The Sapphire HD 4670 Ultimate Edition is not positioned as a gaming card anyway.
The card’s distinguishing feature, the one that gives it the Ultimate Edition title, is the passive cooling system. We have tested a lot of graphics cards with passive coolers in our labs, but the cooler installed on the Sapphire HD 4670 Ultimate Edition has one important advantage. It is compact.
Passive coolers for graphics card are usually very large and always have a dual-slot form-factor because the heatsink has to be made large in order to effectively dissipate all the heat produced by the GPU. The heatsink usually occupies the space below the PCB, but here the developer placed it partially on the other side of the PCB.
The solution seems to be logical because the graphics slot is usually the topmost one on the mainboard. Above it there can only be a rarely used PCI Express x1. So, the empty space can be given to the heatsink. Besides, this design improves the overall efficiency of the system because the hot air from the heatsink does not accumulate below the card but rises up freely to the CPU cooler and to the back-panel system fan that will exhaust it out of the system case.
The part of the cooler located on the face side of the PCB is a heatsink with a copper base that is connected to the main heatsink with two heat pipes. We don’t find a good reason for this technical solution because the heat flow of the RV730 is rather week and might be transferred by one pipe only. Moreover, the ends of the pipes are very close to each other. In other words, the second pipe does not help distribute the heat uniformly in the heatsink, although it would do that if it pierced its top rather than side section.
The only copper elements of this system are the heat pipes and the base that contacts with the GPU die. The other elements are made from aluminum, so the total mass of the cooler is not high. The four spring-loaded screws fasten it to the PCB quite securely. There is traditional dark-gray dense thermal grease between the heat-exchanger’s sole and the graphics core. The memory chips on the face side of the PCB contact with the aluminum heatsink via elastic thermal pads.
The efficiency of this design should theoretically be high enough to cope with a Radeon HD 4670, especially if you’ve got a system fan blowing at the card from a side. Our experiment proved that point: the GPU temperature quickly grew up to 86-88 °C without a fan. But when we added a fan to blow at the card, the GPU temperature was never higher than 56 °C even during a long test session. Thus, you should follow Sapphire’s recommendation and not install this card into a poorly ventilated system case.
We are going to investigate the performance of mainstream graphics accelerators in MMORPG using the following testbed:
The graphics card drivers were configured in the following way:
ATI Catalyst:
Nvidia GeForce:
The list of benchmarks includes nine of the most popular MMORPG:
We selected the highest possible level of detail in each game. As usual, we used only standard tools provided by the game itself from the gaming menu. The games configuration files weren’t modified manually in any way. We are going to look at the performance of eight mainstream graphics cards on ATI and Nvidia GPUs from different price segments:
The ATI Radeon HD 4670 is represented by the above discussed Sapphire HD 4670 Ultimate Edition with the video memory frequency increased to its nominal value of 1000 (2000) MHz.
We ran our tests in the following resolutions: 1280x1024, 1680x1050 and 1920x1200. Everywhere, where it was possible we added MSAA 4x antialiasing to the standard anisotropic filtering 16x. The only exception here was the Age of Conan game because of extremely high requirements it set for the graphics subsystem. Performance was measured manually with Fraps utility version 2.9.8. To ensure higher precision and repeatability of results we ran the test three times and took the average of the three for the performance charts.
Note that the peculiarities of MMORPG gaming genre make it extremely difficult to get steadily repeatable results. Moreover, performance in these games often depends more not on the graphics adapter performance, but on the population of the server, response time and other network-related parameters. We tried to minimize the influence of these factors, however, we urge you not to consider the performance numbers obtained in this test session to be the universal truth. They should merely give you a general idea of what to expect.
The name of Conan is well known to every admirer of heroic fantasy and even to people who are not into fantasy at all. The Cimmerian barbarian created by Robert Ervin Howard is one of the most recognizable fantasy characters of the 20th century. As the name suggests, the game draws upon the world described by that writer. From a technical standpoint, it runs on the DreamWorld engine, developed by the Norwegian company Funcom Productions which is also the developer of Age of Conan itself. The engine is complemented with a foliage generation system called SpeedTree.
The picture provided by the AoC engine looks good just as you can expect from a May 20, 2008 release. It makes a wide use of complex shaders, has a per-pixel lighting model, an advanced shading system, a dynamic cloud generation system based on the so-called Perlin noise, and, starting from March 2009, supports DirectX 10.
Of course, Age of Conan is inferior to Crysis-like 3D shooters that implement the newest advances in 3D graphics, yet its system requirements are quite high at the highest visual quality settings, at least for people who have inexpensive graphics cards. We did not even use 4x FSAA in this game in order to achieve playable frame rates without lowering other settings. Here are the results:
Well, it looks like you have to lower some settings in order to play this game comfortably. It is only the rather expensive GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 that can ensure some comfort at 1280x1024. The complete failure of the Radeon HD 4670 suggests that this card’s rather weak computing resources and low memory bandwidth are a bottleneck in this game. ATI’s new solutions are overall good enough, though. The Radeon HD 4770 is no worse than the GeForce GTS 250 and even ahead of the latter at low resolutions. The Radeon HD 4830 is hamstringed by its low core frequency while the GeForce 9600 GT has inadequate computing resources.
These results suggest that you should choose nothing less than a GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 if you want to experience Age of Conan fully. You can’t save here by choosing a cheap graphics card. This game calls for a top-performance product like a GeForce GTX 285. Pretty visuals come at a high price here.
Established back in 1974, Dungeons & Dragons is considered one of the oldest role-playing games. There were no mass-produced personal computers then, the primitive Altair 8800 only came out a year later. Thus, the D&D universe is a time-tested classic of table RPGs, but it also came to the PC eventually. There is a lot of games based on its setting including such famous titles as Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale and Neverwinter Nights. With D&D enjoying such huge popularity, it had to be made into a MMORPG. Such a game was announced officially on the 28th of February, 2008.
Of course, the game is lacking in the beauty of visual effects and level of detail by the standards of 2009 but, as we have said in the introduction, the quality of graphics is far from being the decisive factor in favor of a particular MMORPG. And despite its age, the game proved to be quite resource-consuming:
The Sapphire HD 4670 Ultimate Edition could only cope with D&D Online when we turned FSAA of. When 4x FSAA was enabled, the card’s bottom speed dropped below 25fps – in a rather easy scene. The other cards behave better, though. It is only the weakest solutions like the Radeon HD 4830 and GeForce 9600 GT that cannot provide a playable frame rate at 1920x1200 with FSAA. As usual, the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 has no rivals but you should only purchase it if you want to play other, more demanding, games.
This game appeals to sci-fi fans because, unlike the majority of MMORPGs, it is set in deep space. Instead of wielding a sword, battleaxe or bow and arrows, the player controls spaceships from tiny frigates to huge flagships and colossal titans. There is no similar game as yet, so Eve Online is unique. It also features a well-developed economical model, which is unique among MMORPGs as well. This model can even serve as a kind of a testbed for economical experimentation.
The game engine does not show any miracles of 3D graphics but that’s hardly a drawback. Although deep space can be beautiful, its beauty is rather uniform and does not load the GPU much. The engine copes well with rendering epic starry sceneries, spacecraft and space battles. Again, Eve Online has modest system requirements and your playing comfort is determined by other factors such as the server’s response time which in its turn depends on the population of the particular star system. The game does not natively support FSAA. Here are the results of our test:
In fact, even a Radeon HD 4670 is good enough for playing at popular resolutions including 1920x1200, but we can see that Nvidia’s solutions are somewhat more confident in Eve Online than their AMD’s opponents. The winner is the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 but its performance is redundant here. There is no point in spending $200 if you can get along with only half that money and have the same playing comfort. Considering the total of consumer properties such as power consumption, energy efficiency and noise, we can recommend you the ATI Radeon HD 4770 as the optimal choice for space adventures. The GeForce GTS 250 can be recommended for those who base their shopping choice on price and performance only.
While Dungeons & Dragons is a progenitor of the role-playing genre, J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings universe is considered by many as the beginning of the fantasy genre itself. There is no point for us to describe the LotR world as you are sure to know it already. People want to play in the worlds of their favorite books and movies and this desire was satisfied by the April 24, 2007, release of The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar. Later on, in 2008, the add-on The Lord of the Rings Online: Mines of Moria was issued. We have tested our inexpensive graphics cards in it.
The game was developed by Turbine Inc., the company that had previously released D&D Online, so LotR Online runs on the same engine codenamed Turbine G3. There were some improvements that made the game more contemporary visually, yet we think LotR Online is a bit outdated in terms of 3D graphics technologies. What about performance then?
Our graphics cards deliver almost the same performance as in Dungeons & Dragons Online. The same three cards fail in the most difficult mode (1920x1200 with 4x FSAA): Sapphire HD 4670 Ultimate Edition, Radeon HD 4830 and GeForce 9600 GT. This time, however, the GeForce 9800 GT joins them as its bottom speed is lower than 25fps. The other cards pass the test well enough, and the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 is even excellent. Still, if you want to play The Lord of the Rings Online comfortably, you can just spend $100 for a Radeon HD 4770 or, if such cards prove to be unavailable, add just a few more dollars and buy a Radeon HD 4850 which delivers similar performance.
The Lineage II series of games is perhaps the most famous series of Korean MMORPGs and a kind of a classic, too. Being a rather standard fantasy-style online game, Lineage II differs from others with its meticulously drawn characters (especially female ones) and their equipment and the very queer operation of the random number generator that is responsible for what items you will find on the body of a slain enemy. This is called Korean random.
Lineage II comes in so-called Chronicles. The first Chronicle was issued in October 2003. The world of Lineage II is updated once every half a year, so the game has changed a lot in gameplay, visuals and content. Today, the sixth Chronicle, called The Chaotic Throne, is the latest. It runs on the time-tested Unreal Engine 2.0.
Of course, the engine is old already and is not match to Unreal Engine 3, but after some face-lifting it still looks good even in the year of 2009, especially in the MMORPG genre. HDR is supported but (the age of the engine shows up again) HDR and FSAA cannot be enabled both at the same time. We selected HDR for our test because it has a bigger effect on the visual aspect of the game than FSAA and produces a better-looking picture. We’ve got the following results:
Save for a few exceptions, the MMORPG genre is indeed all-embracing in that it allows playing with inexpensive hardware: a Radeon HD 4670 is good enough for playing Lineage II at 1680x1050 with maximum graphics quality settings. If you’ve got a 1920x1200 monitor, you may want something better, but not much more expensive, like the Radeon HD 4770. The GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 is ahead of the latter by an average 17% but the bottom speed of the two cards differs by 2fps only. The GeForce GTS 250 feels at ease in this game, too, giving you the choice between ATI and Nvidia products. Considering the power efficiency factor, we’d prefer the Radeon HD 4770, though.
At first sight this game looks like Lineage II until you take a deeper look into its gameplay. In fact, the only thing the two games have in common is the engine, but with a generation gap: Perfect World runs in a greatly modified Unreal Engine 1. Instead of a typical fantasy setting with orcs and elves, Perfect World draws upon Chinese mythology, which might be expected considering the country of origin of that game.
The game world is all about flying. Every race – winged elves, humans and untamed – all can fly. The elves can fly natively while the others can only do that from level 30. The game offers a more flexible system for character appearance customization than what you find in Lineage II and has a huge number of interesting quests that help you grow your character up without wiping out hordes after hordes of identical monsters.
Using the first-generation Unreal Engine, Perfect World looks more archaic than Lineage II, yet it is neither ugly nor primitive. It has high-resolution textures and shows detailed and nice-looking landscapes. How fast are our inexpensive graphics cards in it?
Surprisingly, the game is rather demanding at the maximum graphics quality settings despite its old Unreal Engine. The Sapphire HD 4670 Ultimate Edition cannot offer a playable bottom speed even at 1280x1024. The Radeon HD 4770 and HD 4850 give up at 1680x1050. And at a resolution of 1920x1200 none of the cards, including the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216, can keep the frame rate above 25fps. ATI’s solutions provide a higher bottom speed, so they are preferable for playing Perfect World. There is no difference between the Radeon HD 4770 and Radeon HD 4850.
This game is also known as Requiem Online. It differs from other MMORPGs with its gloomy atmosphere reminding one of scary movies. You can see it in the game races: the only traditional race is the Turans that are almost like humans. But when you take a look at a Kruxena, you realize that Requiem Online is not for lovers of elegant elves. You will like this game if you are fond of everything dark and demonic.
An interesting feature of the game is that the player can transform into a Possession Beast that can be upgraded as well. It is possible to have the power of three Beasts simultaneously, which means that the player can actually have four different characters in a single body. There is also a system of “gene engineering” that allows to create characters with unique stats. By the way, this is the third game in this review (together with Lineage II and Perfect World) that runs on Epic Games’ engine.
Textures are less detailed than in Perfect World or the latest versions of Lineage II, which is partially compensated by the unique designs of characters, monsters, and location architectures. The game has no eye-popping special effects, so we can expect it to be the least demanding of the Unreal Engine based MMORPGs. That’s indeed so:
When there is no FSAA, the GeForce 9600 GT and Radeon HD 4830 are the only cards that don’t reach the performance ceiling at 1280x1024, yet they both deliver frame rates of 70fps and more at 1920x1200. Turning 4x FSAA on reveals the leaders: Radeon HD 4770 and Radeon HD 4850. The Radeon HD 4670 also delivers a playable speed, though. In other words, every inexpensive graphics card, staring from Radeon HD 4670, will do for Requiem Online. This game does not call for a serious investment into hardware.
The Warhammer universe does not need any recommendations. Every gamer who is familiar with table games should know about it. As is typical of this game world, Warhammer Online focuses on battles. This project follows the Realm vs. Realm mechanism with the powers of Order, including dwarfs, humans and high elves, fighting the powers of Destruction including orcs, goblins, tribes of Chaos and dark elves. Every profession belongs to one of four archetypes: tank, close combat, long-range combat and support.
Warhammer Online was developed by Electronic Arts and runs on the Gamebryo Element engine that is also employed in such projects as The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and Fallout 3. Coupled with the release date (September 18, 2008), you might expect high-quality visuals, but Warhammer Online is actually inferior to its single-player cousins running on the same engine.
There are no problems with models, but textures are not very detailed and resemble the multiplatform Dead Space. Special effects are not abundant, either. We guess Warhammer Online lacks the originality of World of Warcraft and the technical advancement of Age of Conan. The world looks good but lacks some special feature like the crazy constructions of orcs or the steam punk buildings of gnomes. FSAA is not supported. The frame rates are as follows:
The game is far from heavy, running fast even on a GeForce 9600 GT. We can only note the higher bottom speed of ATI’s solutions at 1920x1200, but the difference between 81 and 88fps is rather small. Like in most previous games, the Radeon HD 4770 seems to be the optimal choice in the total of its consumer properties. It is cheap, economical, quiet, and fast.
This title must be known to everyone. The very abbreviation WoW has almost become a synonym for “massively multiplayer role-playing game” in the same way as Sound Blaster used to denote every sound card. Due to its tremendous popularity, the product of Blizzard Entertainment has become a huge social phenomenon that leaves no one indifferent. World of Warcraft is a huge and detailed world just as you can expect from Blizzard.
The game is no masterpiece of 3D graphics, but its engine is being constantly modernized and complemented with modern technologies while the original graphical style conceals most of visual defects. A huge advantage is that the game can be launched on almost every graphics card with support for hardware T&L.
The latest, second add-on Wrath of the Lich King was released on the 13th of November, 2008, and sold 2.8 million copies in the first 24 hours. This number alone is the best evidence of the huge popularity of the game. Besides gaming innovations, the add-on features improved visuals. Particularly, there is now a new shader that imitates ice surfaces. There are new fire effects and more realistic shadows. It is rather hard to find out the true performance of a graphics card in World of Warcraft because the network adapter can affect the frame rate greatly due to the dense population of WoW servers. So, the numbers below should be viewed as approximate.
Wrath of the Lich King can be a demanding application at the highest graphics quality settings but there are only two cards that can’t run it fast when FSAA is off: Radeon HD 4670 and GeForce 9600 GT. The former has a higher bottom speed, which may be indicative of a high load on the GPU’s computing resources. The texture-mapping resources are utilized as well: the GeForce GTS 250 is better than the Radeon HD 4770/4850.
Nvidia’s solutions enjoy a bigger advantage when we turn on 4x FSAA although ATI’s RV770- and RV740-based products are good enough even at 1920x1200. Moreover, the Radeon HD 4770 even has a higher bottom speed than the GeForce GTS 250. The performance of World of Warcraft varies wildly and depends not only on the graphics card’s capabilities, so it is good to have some reserve of frame rate. The best choice is Nvidia’s GeForce GTS 250 or, better yet, GeForce GTX 260 Core 216, especially if you plan to play at high resolutions with 4x FSAA.
Now that we tested eight widely available and relatively inexpensive graphics accelerators in nine popular massively multiplayer online RPG we can conclude with sufficient certainty that this gaming genre as a rule doesn’t require a powerful graphics accelerator. Most today’s testing participants ensured sufficient gaming performance in all tests. However, there were a few exceptions that we are going to discuss in detail now.
Even in 1280х1024 Age of Conan turned out pretty demanding with maximum level of detail. The only graphics card that ensured more or less acceptable performance in this game was the not so cheap GeForce GTX 260 Core 216, but even it failed to maintain minimal performance at 25 fps. In Perfect World game two weakest graphics accelerators of our today’s testing participants - Radeon HD 4670 and GeForce 9600 GT – showed too low minimal performance readings. In all other cases all graphics solutions ran fast enough to make gaming possible if no antialiasing was enabled.
Age of Conan became an exception again in the next resolution. Here you will either need a more powerful graphics accelerator than GeForce GTX 260 Core 216, or will have to give up some image quality settings for the sake of sufficient performance. The situation in Perfect World also became more serious: Radeon HD 4670 and all Nvidia based solutions proved unable to maintain the minimal performance at an acceptable level. And in World of Warcraft we lost GeForce 9600 GT.
In 1920х1200 the performance of all testing participants in Age of Conan is below all acceptable levels and it is very unlikely to be that much higher in the 1920x1080 resolution that becomes more and more popular these days. I doubt that even GeForce GTX 295 could help here. Either way, the gamer will have to sacrifice some of the image quality settings. The results in some other games such as LotR Online for instance, indicate that Radeon HD 4670 class of graphics accelerators can’t cope with this resolution, although in Eve Online, Requiem and Warhammer they are powerful enough even for the monitors supporting 1920х1200 resolution.
We have to pay special attention to the antialiasing matter. Not all today’s testing participants support it in the first place. But even with FSAA 4x an MMORPG fan may do just fine with a Radeon HD 4770 or Radeon HD 4850 without investing a ton into a GeForce GTX 295 or Radeon HD 4870 X2 type solution. However, Radeon HD 4670 or GeForce 9600 GT class of cards are not among the possible choices here, especially if we are talking about resolutions exceeding 1280х1024.
Overall, as we have expected there are two leaders in our today’s race: GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 as a solution with highest absolute performance, and Radeon HD 4770 as a solution combining relatively high performance with energy-efficiency and low price. Our personal preferences seem to be on Radeon HD 4770’s side as it has proven to be a true people’s product: cheap, universal, energy-efficient but at the same time fast enough and perfectly fit for contemporary MMORPG.
As for the Sapphire HD 4670 Ultimate Edition graphics card that we have discussed today, we can tell you the following: it is a compact noiseless solution that will be a perfect fit for relatively powerful HTPC systems with good in-case ventilation. The latter is a must because Sapphire card uses passive cooling system. This solution is not the best choice for gaming, because its performance is not high enough for comfortable gaming experience. Nevertheless, Sapphire HD 4670 Ultimate Edition can be used for not very resource-hungry MMORPG, like D&D Online, LotR Online, Eve Online, Warhammer Online, Requiem Online and even the well-known World of Warcraft. However, if your gaming preferences go beyond massively multiplayer online RPG, then you should probably check out Radeon HD 4770 or higher solutions.
Highs:
Lows: