Date:
Tuesday , January 05, 2010
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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AMD's ATI Radeon Eyefinity Performance Review

We’ve covered AMD’s ATI Radeon Eyefinity in terms of the experience provided, and now we will evaluate how Eyefinity actually performs across the entire line of ATI Radeon HD 5000 series video cards. From the Radeon HD 5970 down to the Radeon HD 5750, we review the performance of Eyefinity in some new games and some old.

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Test System Setup

We will be using a Gigabyte EX58-UD5 motherboard, an Intel Core i7 920 Overclocked at 3.6GHz, and 6GB of Corsair TR3X6G1600C8D Dominator DDR3.

While it might be "overkill," we use the Core i7-920 processor at 3.6GHz in an attempt to prevent our review from being CPU limited. Obviously, we make every effort to not use CPU limited games for video card evaluations, but the i7-920 at 3.6GHz seems to put many peoples’ minds at ease when it comes to that subject.

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We are using the absolute latest Catalyst 9.12 Hotfix drivers, which supersede Catalyst 9.12 WHQL. Think of 9.12 Hotfix as Beta drivers, containing fixes not in the WHQL version. This should provide us with the best possible performance from our Eyefinity configuration. It should also be noted that these drivers fully support the Radeon HD 5970’s dual-GPU nature in accelerating Eyefinity resolutions.

Evaluation Method

We evaluate what each video card configuration can supply us in terms of a playable gaming experience while supplying the best culmination of resolution and "eye candy" graphical settings. We focus on quality and immersion of the gameplay experience rather than how many frames per second the card can get in a canned benchmark or prerecorded timedemo situation that often do not represent real gameplay like you would experience at home. Then we will follow with apples-to-apples testing in with minimum, maximum, and average framerates.