Date:
Wednesday, October 08, 2008
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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AMD's ATI Radeon HD 4870 with 1GB of GDDR5

AMD’s brand new ATI Radeon HD 4870 with 1GB of GDDR5 RAM is on the chopping block today. We throw two brand new games at it; Crysis: Warhead and Stalker: Clear Sky. We will directly compare the new 1GB Radeon HD 4870 to a 512MB Radeon HD 4870 and the newer GeForce GTX 260 video cards.

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Crysis: Warhead

(DirectX 10)

We are using the full version of Crysis: Warhead. We will be playing Warhead with the default APIs for our system, which launches automatically in DX10 mode with the 32-bit executable.

Much like the original Crysis, Crysis: Warhead is graphically demanding. The level we have chosen to use as a run-through is one of the most graphically intense levels in the game. We are playing the entire “Train” level. Our run-through starts off with us getting on the train, manning the gun turrets, and blowing up everything along the way as the train progresses down the tracks. We stop at the tower, perform the mission there, and continue on until the end. This run-through consists of explosions, shader effects, dense swamp and foliage, gun fire, enemy combat and oh did we say explosions?

As is standard operating procedure for [H] gameplay testing; our entire method for finding the highest playable levels was achieved by playing through the entire game and finding graphical settings that produce playable results for the entire game, not just the level shown below. We do however feel that the “Train” level is a “worst case scenario” for Warhead in terms of graphics.

Note that in the graphs, we have lowered our redline to 25 FPS for Crysis: Warhead. This game is demanding, and low framerates are impossible to avoid at higher resolutions. Gameplay is also different in this game in that 25 Frames Per Second and better feels very playable. This is very likely due to the efficient use of motion blur. Note that the severe down-spikes in framerate on the graphs are due to saved game points.

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Like its predecessor, Crysis: Warhead taxes these video cards hard. Overall, in our Crysis: Warhead testing we found that 1920x1200 was the best resolution for all three video cards. Of course, it isn’t your only option, and lowering the resolution will allow you to set higher in-game settings. For us, we found a very enjoyable gameplay experience at 1920x1200 (a widescreen resolution) with No AA and 16X AF on all video cards. We opted for a higher resolution for this game because of the horrible aliasing seen on the trees and foliage of which AA will not reduce in this game. (That is due to transparency AA being broken in this game engine for both NVIDIA and AMD.) The only way to help get rid of the aliasing is to go as high as you can on the resolution. This tremendously helps the immersion factor of the game reducing distractions due to terrible jaggies in the foliage.

At 1920x1200 we were able to have the all important Shaders setting to “Gamer” which is the equivalent of “High” in Crysis. We were also able to have Texture Quality and Water Quality at “Gamer” as well which provided a very good looking scene. You will see that no video card here had any advantages over the other whatsoever. The 1GB Radeon HD 4870 at these settings provided no real-world advantages over the 512MB Radeon HD 4870. The 216 Core GTX 260 was slightly faster than the 4870 video cards, but nothing significant that was noticeable in-game, only in a graphed run-through. Warhead at these settings is obviously shader-limited as we see our extra 512MB of 4870 memory due little if nothing for us in this title.

It looks like your Crysis: Warhead gameplay experiences will be the same between all three video cards.