Sapphire HD4870 512mb DDR5
Call of Duty 4 is a stunning DirectX 9.0c based game that really looks awesome and has a very full feature set. With lots of advanced lighting, smoke and water effects, the game has excellent explosions along with fast gameplay. Using the in-built Call Of Duty features, a 10-minute long game play demo was recorded and replayed on each of the GPU’s using the /timedemo command a total of 5 times. The highest and lowest FPS results were then removed, with an average being calculated from the remaining 3 results.
The advantage the ATI cards held in the 3DMark set of benchmarks seems to have wavered once we start playing ‘real’ games. Although not a drastic deficit, the NVidia cards had the advantage in COD4, albeit at a greater cost per frame.
BioShock is a recent FPS shooter by 2K games. Based on the UT3 engine, it has a large amount of advanced DirectX techniques including excellent water rendering and superb lighting and smoke techniques. All results were recorded using F.R.A.P.S with a total of 5 identical runs through the same area of the game. The highest and lowest results were then removed, with an average being calculated from the remaining 3 results.
Unsurprisingly the two 4870’s were evenly matched. What is surprising as that both managed to out perform the GTX260 at both resolutions with the gap increasing once AA was applied. A very good performance for ATI in the first of our DX10 benchmarks.
