Radeon HD 5970 Single card and Crossfire review

Setup your monitor first

Before playing games, setting up your monitor's contrast & brightness levels is a very important thing to do. I realized recently that a lot of you guys have set up your monitor improperly. How do we know this? Because we receive a couple of emails every now and then telling us that a reader can't distinguish between the benchmark charts (colors) in our reviews. We realized, if that happens, your monitor is not properly set up.

This simple test pattern is evenly spaced from 0 to 255 brightness levels, with no profile embedded. If your monitor is correctly set up, you should be able to distinguish each step, and each step should be visually distinct from its neighbors by the same amount. Also, the dark-end step differences should be about the same as the light-end step differences. Finally, the first step should be completely black.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Modern Warfare 2 is set five years on from COD4 and brings a new villain into town: Vladimir Makarov. All the trouble all starts when Makarov frames the US for a terrorist attack on a Russian airport (yes, the infamous airport level). The rest of the story follows the same intertwined British and US mission format as before, and the missions are all incredible set-pieces that involve storming oil rigs, climbing icy cliffs and, of course, an adrenaline packed snowmobile chase.  Visually the 3D engine seems to be the same as the COD4 one, it's tweaked and nearly abused to push out the very best of it's capability. The result is a very decent looking game really, smoke, fog, sun, vegetation detailed texturing of objects building and characters.

Our image quality settings selected are the most complex you can set in-game. 4x AA, maxed out anisotropic filtering, the best textures, everything is enabled to it's maximum capability. Any decent graphics card can run the game, it's that simple. There's no need to give in to lower quality settings.

Image Quality setting:

• 4x Anti-Aliasing
• 16x Anisotropic Filtering
• All settings maxed out

Now as you guys know we posted a large VGA performance article on MF2 this week. Fot that test we used the level Loose Ends, and pretty much all multi-GPU results where somewhat off. We now test in the ACT II: Contingency level where scaling seems to work a little better. But due to that reason we only have so very few results. I was able to throw in the Single GPU based Radeon HD 5870, obviously the Radeon HD 5970 and the competition's GeForce GTX 295.

105 FPS on average (!) at 2560x1600 with 16xAF and 4xAA -- let me tell you, it's quite an experince.

Call of Duty 5: World at War

The raid of Makin Island, one of the first levels, starts with you tied to a chair, faced with a smug Japanese general. He puffs cigar smoke in your face, before turning to one of your comrades and shouting appropriately phrased Japanese at him. The scene is set, and trust me, you'll be focused. World at War throws out the rulebook of war to transform WWII combat through a new enemy, new tactics and an uncensored experience of the climatic battles that gripped a generation. As U.S. Marines and Russian soldiers, players will employ new features like cooperative gameplay, and weapons such as the flamethrower in the most chaotic and cinematically intense experience to date.

Call of Duty World at War uses the exact same 3D engine as Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. It does have some new graphics tweaks. We have chosen the level most badass on the GPU, which boils down to the Blood and Iron Tank level. It's a really fun level where you get to drive around in a tank armed with heavy ammunition and a flame thrower, there's just a lot going on. When the level loads up you immediately notice dense vegetation, a decent amount of complex shaders, volumetric smoke, heaps of objects. All in all one of the most heavy on the GPU levels. In fact the rest of the levels would get you 20-25% more performance on average, this one is just more complex to render.

Our image quality settings are the most complex you can set in-game. 4x AA, maxed out anisotropic filtering, the best textures, everything is enabled to it's maximum capability. Any decent graphics card can run the game, it's that simple. There's no need to give in to lower quality settings.

Image Quality setting:

• 4x Anti-Aliasing
• 16x Anisotropic Filtering
• All settings maxed out

A problem with COD5 is that we are running into CPU limitation, hence the flat line. The two GPUs literally are waiting on the processor to feed them data, and as such are not utilized 100%.

Due to CPU limitation we face the fact that all high-end cards at 1920x1200 pretty much show the same performance. But it's abundantly clear that COD 5 definitely is not an issue for this graphics card.