Testbed and Methods

We are going to investigate the performance of Radeon HD 5700 graphics cards using the following universal testbed:

• Intel Core i7-965 Extreme Edition processor (3.2 GHz, 6.4 GT/s QPI);  
• Gigabyte GA-EX58-Extreme mainboard (Intel X58 Express chipset);
• Corsair XMS3-12800C9 (3 x 2 GB, 1333 MHz, 9-9-9-24, 2T);
• Maxtor MaXLine III 7B250S0 HDD (250 GB, Serial ATA-150, 16 MB buffer);
• Enermax Galaxy DXX EGX1000EWL 1000 W power supply;
• Dell 3007WFP monitor (30", 2560x1600 @ 60 Hz max display resolution);
• Microsoft Windows 7;
• ATI Catalyst 8.66.6 Beta 2 Juniper for ATI Radeon HD 5700/5800;
• ATI Catalyst 9.9 for ATI Radeon HD 4800;
• Nvidia GeForce 191.07 WHQL for Nvidia GeForce.

The graphics card drivers were configured in the following way:

ATI Catalyst:

• Smoothvision HD: Anti-Aliasing: Use application settings/Box Filter
• Catalyst A.I.: Standard
• Mipmap Detail Level: High Quality
• Wait for vertical refresh: Always Off
• Enable Adaptive Anti-Aliasing: On/Quality
• Other settings: default

Nvidia GeForce:

• Texture filtering – Quality: High quality
• Texture filtering – Trilinear optimization: Off
• Texture filtering – Anisotropic sample optimization: Off
• Threaded optimization: Auto
• Vertical sync: Force off
• Antialiasing - Gamma correction: On
• Antialiasing - Transparency: Multisampling
• Multi-GPU performance mode: NVIDIA recommended
• Multi-display mixed-GPU acceleration: Multiple display performance mode
• Set PhysX GPU acceleration: Enabled
• Ambient Occlusion: Off
• Other settings: default

The list of benchmarks includes the following gaming titles and synthetic tests:

First-Person 3D Shooters

• Call of Duty: World at War
• Crysis Warhead
• Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
• Far Cry 2
• Left 4 Dead
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky

Third-Person 3D Shooters

• Street Fighter IV
• Resident Evil 5

RPG

• Fallout 3

Simulators

• Need for Speed: Shift
• Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X.

Strategies

• BattleForge
• World in Conflict: Soviet Assault

Semi-synthetic benchmarks

• Futuremark 3DMark Vantage

We selected the highest possible level of detail in each game using standard tools provided by the game itself from the gaming menu. The games configuration files weren’t modified in any way, because the ordinary user doesn’t have to know how to do it. We made a few exceptions for selected games if that was necessary. We are going to specifically dwell on each exception like that later on in our article.

Besides Radeon HD 5770 and Radeon HD 5750 we have also included the following graphics accelerators to participate in our test session:

• ATI Radeon HD 5870 (RV870, 850/850/4800 MHz, 1600 sp, 80 tmu, 32 rbe, 256-bit, 1024 MB GDDR5)
• ATI Radeon HD 4890 (RV790, 850/850/3900 MHz, 800 sp, 40 tmu, 16 rbe, 256-bit, 1024 MB GDDR5)
• ATI Radeon HD 4770 (RV740, 750/750/3200 MHz, 640 sp, 32 tmu, 16 rbe, 128-bit, 512 MB GDDR5)
• Nvidia GeForce GTX 275 (G200b, 633/1404/2484 MHz, 240 sp, 80 tmu, 28 rbe, 448-bit, 896 MB GDDR3)
• Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 (G200b, 576/1242/2000 MHz, 216 sp, 72 tmu, 28 rbe, 448-bit, 896 MB GDDR3)

We ran our tests in the following resolutions: 1280x1024, 1680x1050, 1920x1200 and 2560x1600. Everywhere, where it was possible we added MSAA 4x antialiasing to the standard anisotropic filtering 16x. We enabled antialiasing from the game’s menu. If this was not possible, we forced them using the appropriate driver settings of ATI Catalyst and Nvidia GeForce drivers.

Performance was measured with the games’ own tools and the original demos were recorded if possible. We measured not only the average speed, but also the minimum speed of the cards where possible. Otherwise, the performance was measured manually with Fraps utility. In the latter case we ran the test three times and took the average of the three for the performance charts.