Thread: HardOCP looks at AMD EyeFinity

Hey, I guess that's authorization for you to buy your new video card, Al.

lol. You got served!

OMG this crap cost so much money.... I for sure want to get a eyefinity setup but I will wait for 2nd or 3rd wave.

Grand Theft Auto IV is another of these not-so-oldie but goodie games that is known to be CPU dependent. It is also known that cranking up the resolution simply eats up performance on graphics cards. In our past evaluations using this game we more often than not found lower resolutions as our highest playable settings simply because there was a large drop when raising the resolution. This game is notorious for using large textures and eating framebuffers for lunch. This game, like FSX, also greatly benefits from an Eyefinity configuration. The added world detail with a large view is spectacular, allowing you to see the entire city around you.

Let’s start off with the lowest-end video card here, the Radeon HD 5770, because it was the most shocking. Quite simply the Radeon HD 5770 is unplayable in GTA4 at 5760x1200. We set every in-game option to the lowest possible values, which means all "Low" settings, all the distance settings at their lowest values and Definition turned Off. Even with the absolute lowest in-game settings possible here the Radeon HD 5770 could not muster more 32 FPS max and an average of close to 22 FPS. The game was horrible to play at this resolution on the Radeon HD 5770, you just can’t do it. The Radeon HD 5770 is the card to avoid for Eyefinity resolutions in GTA4.

Moving up to the Radeon HD 5850 things did not get much better. Even with the Radeon HD 5850 we had to keep everything at the lowest values in the game. We had all options at "Low" and all distance options down to their lowest values. The only option we could enable was Definition, which doesn’t do much when the Textures themselves are at "Low" to begin with. At least at these settings the framerates were playable. Therefore you can play at 5760x1200 on the Radeon HD 5850; you’re just going to find the game looks like crap.

With the Radeon HD 5870 we were able to move some settings upwards, but not far. We were able to take the Textures, Reflections and Shadows to "Medium", which helped. We were only able to take the distance sliders up slightly though, hardly making much of a difference there. The biggest improvement was moving the Textures and Reflections to "Medium."

Finally, with the Radeon HD 5970 things started to seem much better for this game. GTA4 has always taken advantage of dual-GPU video cards, but never quite that well since you could only play at lower resolutions anyway. In fact, on AMD video cards, CrossFireX is not supported past two GPUs in this game because there is degradation in performance past that. Here at 5760x1200 the benefits of two GPUs are weighing in and finally showing that this game can be very GPU dependent when the conditions are right.

With the Radeon HD 5970 we were able to take the Reflections, Water and Shadows to "Very High." We did have to keep the Textures at "Medium" though. It seems even with the Radeon HD 5970 you can’t escape the 1GB framebuffer for each GPU, and this game eats that for breakfast. When we used higher Texture settings we experience choppy and broken performance. We were also able to move the distance sliders up to values that actually made a difference visually.

So what we discovered for GTA4 is that it is a GPU killer at high Eyefinity resolutions, and nothing less than the Radeon HD 5970 will do.

Good to know but for a single 1920x1200 display the 5850 should be plenty. I did notice though that they used medium texture settings for the benchmark instead of high.

still waiting on those 2gb cards........
might go with nvidia......
























YEA RIGHT!

utt utt you had me there for a second Jason.