AMD ATI Radeon HD 4870 1024MB review

Gaming: Call of Duty 4

Activision recently released Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the next installment in the popular war game series. Moving away from the World War II setting, Modern Warfare instead centers around a conflict involving Russia and the Middle East. And hey, you even get to die... and then continue the game in the past.

Call of Duty 4 - For this benchmark we disguise ourselves in the Ghillie suit, and load up ACT II - All Ghillied Up. Not just for the great gameplay, but also the intense and dense graphics utilized are breathtaking. Massive high-quality texturing, shaders and a serious amount of shadows, fog and debris are applied in this level to mask and hide as best as you can.

As you can see, it's almost too close to call. But the ATI cards definitely have a small lead.

Image Quality setting:

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

Our test level - All Ghillied Up - more hefty on the GPU opposed to other levels.

Gaming: Crysis - Single Player v1.2

With mankind facing an alien cataclysm, your elite Delta force and North Korean forces combine, united by common humanity in a battle to save Earth. Graphically stunning, tactically challenging and always intensely immersive, Crysis sets player choice at the heart of its gameplay, with customizable tactical weaponry and adaptable armor allowing instant response to changing conditions. Crysis doesn't feel all that different from its predecessor, Far Cry. Both are set on an island. Both involve a latent alien menace. Both bid you move more or less linearly through shaggy jungle areas, where the fact that you're progressing in a single direction is camouflaged by your ability to approach obstacles in your path any way you like. Think the "every time you play a situation yields radically different behaviors and results" approach in games like Rainbow Six Vegas or Gears of War except on more of a geographic scale.

Oh yeah, you probably want to hear about how it performs, right?

Image Quality setting:

• 0x Anti-Aliasing
• 16x Anisotropic Filtering

Traditionally NVIDIA cards do really well with Crysis. But with Radeon series 4000 things are slowly moving. NVIDIA still has an advantage in the lower resolutions where it seems to deal with CPU overhead a little better, but once we pass 1600x1200 we see a marginal win for the 1024MB Radeon 4870.