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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  • silverblue - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link

    With any luck they'll become plentiful in a short space of time, offering early adopters the chance to set up a decent EF, umm, setup.

    If you think the typical EF setup will be two or three monitors, do you expect the full six monitor glory with an X2 part? I'm still wondering if even the 5870 can handle three monitors and still offer smooth gaming performance. That said, despite their power they're not going to strictly be gaming cards.
  • papapapapapapapababy - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link

    the fact that this cards consume little power is irrelevant when you have that great efficiency on the 5800... also including the Eyefinity gimmick here is a mistake, it only diminishes the value of that feature on the 5800. It should have been 1 card. HD 5770:
    no Eyefinity, 800 SP, 750MHz, 512MB = $99 USD

  • CarrellK - Wednesday, October 14, 2009 - link

    Eyefinity (EF) will be in all 5xxx products for a multiplicity of useful reasons, many of which aren't apparent yet. There will be frequent roll-outs of new EF goodness. There will be many, many customers who will find EF very useful. Hopefully you will realize what EF can do for you and buy one of our products. We'd like for you to be a happy customer of ours.

    CarrellK



  • yacoub - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link

    " It should have been 1 card. HD 5770:
    no Eyefinity, 800 SP, 750MHz, 512MB = $99 USD "

    Close, but no. 1GB of VRAM is mandatory anymore, and it needs the 256-bit bus or more texturing units and ROPs. And then it could be $125.
  • yacoub - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link

    Something's wrong when two of these in CrossFire can't match a single 5850. Blah.
  • qwertymac93 - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link

    why no mention of 4770? i know its older and slower, but its also 40nm like the 5750 and is the same price, it would be nice to see the difference between the two as they are specked quite closely(640sp@750mhz, 720sp@700mhz, both 128bit gddr5)
  • snarfbot - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link

    legion hardware has a good review comparing them both.

    the 5750 is between 1-3 fps faster.

    the 5750 has better overclocking potential thanks to the ram i guess, but im not sure if its worth the extra 25 bucks.

    kinda a wait and see thing for this part
  • Seramics - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link

    Yet another good reviews from AT, thanks Ryan. However, it becomes clear cards like HD5870 and HD5770 isnt a very good performer for its price. HD5850 and HD5750 512MB repeesents a more solid bang for bucks. Again its very amazing that AMD has been able to bring us so many next gen DX11 cards when Windows 7 isnt even launched yet and their competitor is being super slow by onli recently releasing a non high end part of G200 derivatives. That being said, from the point of view of solely performance, Cypress and Juniper is kinda a disappointing performer for its price, as well as for its specifications.
  • pullmyfoot - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link

    Hmm. I was expecting the 5770 to perform either at the 4890 levels or slightly slower at very least while running cooler and taking up less power. This is quite disappointing. I was all ready to get one to replace my 4850 if the price was right. I wonder how well they can tweak the drivers for this thing.
  • yacoub - Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - link

    Same here, although I'd replace my 8800GT with it. I expected about 25% more performance, and about $10 less MSRP ($150).

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