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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  • papapapapapapapababy - Saturday, October 17, 2009 - link

    http://ht4u.net/reviews/2009/amd_ati_radeon_hd_570...">http://ht4u.net/reviews/2009/amd_ati_radeon_hd_570...

    use babel
  • Zool - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link

    The 5700 series have the same improved adaptive antialiasing with shaders like the 5800 series ?
    There could be a antialiasing graph with diferent resoutions and antialiasing types for each card in reviews.
  • RDaneel - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link

    I may be in the minority, but I've already ordered a 5750. For a SOHO box used for only occasional gaming, it was the most future-proofed option (DX11) that also has low enough idle draw that it actually will save me enough money over the life of the card to justify any price difference with a 48xx card. Would I have loved 10% more performance, sure, but this isn't a bad blend of efficiency and longevity.
  • yacoub - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link

    imho, it's perfect for that situation.

    Those of us who have a gaming PC with a DX10 card in it are the ones who find this 5700 series less than stellar.
  • ET - Thursday, October 15, 2009 - link

    But those of us that have a mid-range PC with yesteryear's DX10 card (3870) find it appealing. :)
  • SantaAna12 - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link

    are you filtering out comments these days?
  • SantaAna12 - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link

    what up AT?
    ive been lookin at your recent AMD rants, and its getting tiresome. They paying u the big bucks these days? when you only compare AMD cards against AMD cards you are doing your site a disservice. When you show CF but no SLI you are showing me a new AT.

    I have expected more in the past. You goin the route of TOMS?

  • Ryan Smith - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link

    As we noted in the article, the CF configuration is mostly for academic reasons. I don't seriously expect anyone to pick it over a single card.

    Anyhow, what would you like to see? I have the SLI data for the 275 and the 285, but since we've already established that the 260C216 is faster than the 5770, it won't really tell you anything useful.
  • just4U - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link

    "NVIDIA would need to shave the price down to justify its purchase once more (something they have not done on the GTX series in response to the 5870 and 5850)."

    ------------------

    I'd like to comment on this for just a moment. Where I live we haven't seen much stock on the new dx11 cards yet.. however, Suddenly there's a slew of highly priced 295's and other top end Nvidia products that these stores were not stocking.

    My bet is that .. people walking in and making a purchase find out that they can't get that coveted new DX11 card so they opt out for one of those. So in a sense Nvidia would be riding on the coattails of Ati's new popular line that .. just doesn't have the availability. They haven't had to lower prices yet because they may be benifiting by the lack of stocked cards.

    Make sense?
  • Ananke - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link

    No, it doesn't make sense :)
    Why would you spent 3-400 for something that you don't want at first place? Why just not keep your money until you actually can buy what you want? We are not talking about 10 bucks, it is way bigger chunk...

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