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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  • 7Enigma - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link

    Because people are impatient and need instant gratification. This happens everywhere...
  • erple2 - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link

    That, and people walking into stores to buy computer equipment aren't generally looking for the best deal.
  • Ananke - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link

    I respect the MONEY :). Wasting money for something that doesn't quite fit my intention is not my way. But, people are different, I guess not everybody would do the same...My point is, better pay and get what you exactly want and need, otherwise later you'll regret. Now, if you have so much money to waste, buy anything :) that's different story.

    5770 with that anemic 128bit bus is worth less than $100, in my opinion. Above $100 it is just wasting money for getting nothing :)
  • just4U - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link

    Thing is, people shopping for a new card probably do not have one of the latter cards.. or what they do have is fairly sub par. While they may have a good idea what they'd like to get...

    ... alot of times you see them settle. Hell even those among us who are tech savvy have done that from time to time. Seems to me that's sort of what Nvidia's doing right now.
  • Hrel - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link

    I need a new card, I want it to be DX11, but the performance isn't there. I want something about 10 percent faster than a 1GB 4870 for about 150 bucks, and something about 10 percent faster than a 4890 for less than 200 bucks; with DX11. Once I see a card like that, from AMD or Nvidia; I'll buy it. Stupid X1650Pro is REALLY limping along in modern games and I'm starting to get sick of low res and min settings.
  • Ananke - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link

    Really good cards.....not worth the money though :)
    Did I just summarized it well ?
  • snarfbot - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link

    it would be nice to see some benches with crysis w/o aa.

    if they really are bandwidth limited that would make the difference.

    also overclocked performance, if the memory is the limiting factor then the 5750 would probably be a pretty good bang for the buck.
  • Leyawiin - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link

    The HD 5850 was "wow". The HD 5770 is a little "meh". Its great you have something that sits between the HD 4850 and HD 4870 in performance with such low power requirements and noise, but that price has to come down.
  • silverblue - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link

    I view the 5770 as a natural successor to the 4770/4830/4850 (so I wouldn't expect a 5830 to appear, for example) as opposed to a replacement for the 4870. By now I'd expect 40nm yields to be much better than a few months back when TSMC had issues producing the RV740 variants so hopefully any dies that are defective are only minimally so and ATI can put them on the 5750 cards. Makes me wonder about the lower-range cards due next year though.

    The Eyefinity ports are an enigma, however it could make for a very nice business class card assuming anyone can afford those dongles.
  • CarrellK - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link

    If you are building an Eyefinity (EF) setup, you prolly don't have three monitors. You prolly have one or two. This means you will be buying at least one monitor. My advice: buy a DP monitor that matches the physical size & resolution of your existing monitors. That way you don't need to get an adapter.

    CarrellK

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