New benchmarks - Radeon HD 5870 Review
Posted by Kathleen Maher on August 17th 2010 | Discuss
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Two new games are out, or will be shortly, and they run DirectX, even though they look like re-ports from a console platform.
Nonetheless they do have interesting effects and lighting in them, and give a GPU an interesting workout.
“Mafia II”
Developed by 2K Czech (previously known as Illusion Softworks), “Mafia II” is published by 2K Games and was first announced in August 2007 at the Leipzig Games Convention. Developed originally for PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360, a PC version will be out soon. A 3rd person shooter, driver, maze game with a pretty linear track, the graphics are good, very nice smoke and lighting with soft shadows, and the physics are quite impressive. The opening machinima video, is damn impressive—look at the lips, the eyes, and breathing. The cars and action are quite cool, and it’s going to be a fun game.
It has a built in benchmark and you can adjust a lot of the variables, tune it to the graphics board you have.
We go to the extreme turning everything on and then ran it on a AMD HD 5870 and Nvidia GTX 480. We ran the HD 5870 in an AMD Vision Black system and the GTX 480 in a Core i7. We were too lazy and pressed for time to swap the boards so there may be some CPU bias involved with our results. Sue us.
On average the GTX 480/i7 beat the HD 5870/VB by 20% in FPS as measured by the game’s benchmark.
However, both machines were well above 60 FPS so I don’t think the actual score matters that much.
“Lost Planet 2”
We only had a demo of this game, which was not very impressive in terms of story or character movement, but it did have some interesting lighting effects, and pretty good water.
“Lost Planet 2” is a third-person shooter video game developed and published by Capcom. The game is the sequel to “Lost Planet: Extreme Condition.” It’s another console re-port and pretty lame looking.
On average the GTX 480/i7 beat the HD 5870/VB by a whopping 45% in FPS as measured by the game’s benchmark, no doubt there will be some new AMD drivers aimed at that.
These scores may or may not actually reflect what the game play would be like, and you can turn effects off if you encounter stuttering, which we saw when the monster was stomping around getting blasted by the soldiers.
3rd person shooters are generally boring, and totally console games for little boys. There are some notable exceptions to that (stupid) comment like “Max Payne,” and “Left 4 Dead.”
What do we think?
Both games and boards are highly playable, and if the games appeal to you, you’ll have a fun time. We tried them on a HD 5830 and that was mixed—sub 30fps in LP2 but 50 fps in M2.
Nvidia didn’t have the SLI profiles done yet so we couldn’t do a 2x480 vs. 5970 compare, but we will. And we might event get ambitious enough to swap platforms.
