XFX ATI 4000 Series Round Up

 
Crysis is without doubt one of the most visually stunning and hardware-challenging games to date. By using CrysisBench – a tool developed independently of Crysis – we performed a total of 5 timedemo benchmarks using a GPU-intensive pre-recorded demo. To ensure the most accurate results, the highest and lowest benchmark scores were then removed and an average calculated from the remaining three.
 
 
 
 
 

Oblivion from Bethseda is now an ‘old’ game by today’s standards, but is still one of the most visually taxing games out there. The benchmark was run in the wilderness with all settings set to the maximum possible. Bloom was used in preference to HDR. The test was run five times with the average FPS then being deduced.

 

 
 

Ubisoft has developed a new engine specifically for Far Cry 2, called Dunia, meaning “world”, “earth” or “living” in Parsi. The engine takes advantage of multi-core processors as well as multiple processors and supports DirectX 9 as well as DirectX 10. Running the Far Cry 2 benchmark tool the test was run 5 times with the highest and lowest scores being omitted and the average calculated from the remaining 3.
 

 
 
Results Analysis
 
Crysis was just about playable at 1690×1050 with the 4850XXX but increasing the resolution and IQ to the max resulted in a slide show effect which sadly had a very negative effect on the cost per frame. With all cards around the £10 per frame per Crysis it really does become cringe worthy the more you think about it. All cards performed better in Oblivion with the 4850XXX proving a sensible purchase should you not wish to game at the highest resolution. The 4870XXX was the most expensive card in terms of CPF at the highest resolution and was beaten by both FPS and CPF by it’s stablemate the 4890XXX. Far Cry 2 was much the same story with the 4850 struggling at high resolutions and the 4870×2 dominating with the 4890 and 4870’s heading bringing up the rear respectively.
 
Let’s move on to the conclusion…

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