Crysis: Warhead

We’ll start with Crysis: Warhead, one of our most demanding games.

The 80% reduction in shader units from the 5670 becomes apparent quickly here, as the 5450 and comparable cards are all in the teens for a framerate. This puts us at 75% below the 5670, and even compared to the GT220 the 5450 is still less than half as fast. Even with these already lower settings, we’re going to have to go lower yet to get playable framerates. This will set the stage for the entire review.

Once we drop down to Performance quality, we hike to up playable framerates at a cost visual fidelity. The 5450 is ahead of the GeForce 210 like we expected, but interestingly it’s behind the lower-clocked 4550. We can get just-playable framerates at 1280 here, and more than playable down at 1024.
The Test Far Cry 2
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  • andy o - Thursday, February 4, 2010 - link

    [I got an error, so sorry if this is posted twice.]

    It's not overclocking at all. Powerplay is, as the poster above said, for power efficiency only. It actually doesn't overclock at all, but underclocks when the GPU is not being stressed.

    If you're referring to one of the posts that requires you to enable overdrive, notice that it's only being enabled so you can stabilize the clock (and thus effectively disabling powerplay), but the GPU/mem are actually being underclocked by messing with an xml file and lowering the clocks manually via overdrive.
  • ATWindsor - Thursday, February 4, 2010 - link

    First of all, its not really a "audiophile feature" to get audio without droputs and other problems over HDMI, its devastating for the audio, no matter if you are a audiophile or not, secondly, powerplay is also used for power efficiency. The result is that HDMI audio doesn't work with default-setting for many people, this is a pretty major issue.

    AtW
  • andy o - Thursday, February 4, 2010 - link

    OK so hyperlinks aren' working.

    This is the first thread I linked.
    http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=17...">http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=17...

    this is the doom9 thread.
    http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1359418#po...">http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1359418#po...

    ATI is giving some users the runaround.
  • ereavis - Thursday, February 4, 2010 - link

    try this ATI hotfix
    http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/ATICata...">http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/ATICata...
  • andy o - Thursday, February 4, 2010 - link

    already did, and it's the same with 9.11, 9.12, 9.12 hotfix, 10.1, and version 8.70RC2 (presumably 10.2 RC2).
  • toyota - Thursday, February 4, 2010 - link

    am I missing something? why are you saying Far Cry 2 benchmark cant go lower than high settings? all you have to do is select DX9 and you can choose low or medium from there.
  • Ryan Smith - Thursday, February 4, 2010 - link

    We stick to DX10 mode for benchmarking DX10-enabled games. In fact I never even tried DX9, otherwise I would have noticed that it goes lower.

    Humm...
  • toyota - Thursday, February 4, 2010 - link

    well anybody trying to game on this thing will have to use whatever realistic playable settings are available. that means DX9 for Crysis/Warhead and Far Cry 2 would need to be used.
  • andy o - Thursday, February 4, 2010 - link

    That option has been there for a while, but there's no info on what exactly it does.
  • Ryan Smith - Thursday, February 4, 2010 - link

    Frankly, AMD has never documented it well. It has something to do with working with Windows MMCSS and DXVA to do exactly what the name describes, and that's all I know off-hand.

    It's aptly named though; I've seen a number of examples where enabling it does what's on the label.

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