Crysis: Warhead

Kicking things off, we’ll start with Crysis: Warhead. Warhead is still the single most demanding game in our arsenal, with cards continuing to struggle to put out a playable frame rate with everything turned up.

Update: As a few of you pointed out, there was something a bit off with our Crysis results; we had a Radeon 4850 beating the 5770. As it turns out we wrote down the maximum framerate for the 4850 instead of the average framerate. None of the other results were affected, and this has been corrected. Sorry, folks.

There are a few different situations we’re going to be interested in. The first is the matchup between the 5770, the 4870, and the GTX 260. The second is the matchup between the 5750, the 4850, and the GTS 250. The third is the 5770 as compared to the 5800 series, in order to see what another $100 or $200 is buying you in the Evergreen family.

Unfortunate for the 5770, this is not a game that treats it well. In spite of the clock speed advantage over the 4870, and the architectural advantages (extra caches and what-not), it underperforms the 4870 by about 15% here. AMD had once told us that they believed that they weren’t memory bandwidth constrained on the 4870/4890, but when that’s the only significant difference between the 5770 and the 4870 that would explain the performance difference (certainly Juniper wouldn’t be slower than RV770), we are beginning to doubt that. Meanwhile the GTX 260 outscores the 5770 here too.

Looking at the 5770 compared to the 5850, $100 buys you roughly 50% more performance.

The 5750 fares much better here. It beats the 4850 by 10%-20%, and beats the GTS 250 by a similar margin.

The Test Far Cry 2
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  • endlesszeal - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link

    sorry, if this seems newbest since im still using DVI. anyway, i did a quick peak at apples site and only saw minidp to dvi dongle. however, i jumped over to monoprice and found this:

    http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id...">http://www.monoprice.com/products/produ...1&p_...

    would that work?
  • Xajel - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link

    Nope this wont work, the card(s) has only two TMDS's for one DVI and one DVI or HDMI, you can't use two DVI's + HDMI...

    if you want to connect the third monitor you have to use Display Port, and adapters won't work since DP on this card doesn't support DVI single Pass through ( this will need a seperated TMDS chip )

    there's some devices that support DVI/HDMI pass throught using DisplayPort, I'm talking about Apple latest Mac's where they dropped DVI/HDMI and replaced it with DP... that one supports DVI/HDMI adapters as it has it's own TMDS chip which is required for DVI/HDMI signals...
  • elfick - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link

    Monitors with HDMI seem fairly common and DP-HDMI adapters appear to be cheap. Could you do DP-HDMI, HDMI, and DVI for a triple monitor setup?
  • Ryan Smith - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link

    DP-HDMI is still a passive converter, so it still won't work.
  • Ryan Smith - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link

    No, it has to be an active (powered) adapter. You can tell if one is active if it has a USB plug, since that's where they're drawing power from.
  • Minion4Hire - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link

    It has to be powered if you wish to run dual-link DVI. The single-link MonoPrice adapter will work fine for resolutions up to 1920x1200. But most people looking to run Eyefinity will probably be wanting to go whole-hog with 2560x1600 given the large price tag already associated with such a setup.
  • kzig - Thursday, October 29, 2009 - link

    If I want to run 3 1280 x 1024 monitors together as 3840 x 1024 in Eyefinity, will I need an active adapter, or can I use a cheaper passive one?
  • BladeVenom - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link

    The Apple one is poorly rated. Dell has one, but it to is $100. And just to rerepeat that, it has to be an active adapter. http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/products/Cables...">http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/prod...us&l...
  • Ryan Smith - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link

    I was going to respond to this, but Xajel took the words out of my mouth. Just read his post, it explains why an active adapter is required.
  • bijeshn - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link

    Phasing out the 4870 is a bad idea. With time I look forward to the 4870 dropping even lower in price...

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