Radeon HD 4870 review - ASUS

Gaming: Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2

Don't mistake the PC version for being a port of the Xbox 360 game. The PC version has larger and different levels than those featured on the Xbox 360, as well as a different graphics engine and style of gameplay.

The game itself looks great and the intricate physics modeling seen in the single-player version is still active in the multiplayer version.

There are all sorts of other interactions you'll encounter in multiplayer.
For instance, aluminum cans litter the street and stepping on them not only kicks them around, but also creates a loud sound that may betray your presence to the enemy.

And here are the results done with the newer GRAW2. Image Quality settings:

• Edge Smoothing Anti Aliasing
• 16x anisotropic filtering
• Dynamic shadows HIGH

Unfortunately for AMD, they can't win them all. NVIDIA always was really strong in this benchmark, even the 9800 GTX+ is leading here.

Gaming: Race Driver - GRID

Codemasters has released Race Driver: GRID, offering many Race events to compete in. Word is: "Charge a Ford Mustang GTR muscle car through the iconic streets of San Francisco, race a BMW 320Si in the Jarama Touring Car Race and drift around the docks of Yokohama in a Nissan Silvia S15. Race against 11 friends on your favorite track and test your mettle online or prove yourself in the single player game." GRID is a stunning game with great racing feel, but most of all .. excellent graphics.

Based on the Ultra image quality settings you are looking at resolutions from 10x7 up to the mother of all resolutions, the 4M+ pixels counting 2560x1600. To spice image quality up, we enabled 4xMSAA as well.

Image Quality Settings

• Ultra - everything maxed out
• 4x MSAA

Again a win for the 4870. Now you already noticed it I guess,  I do not know what exactly is going on at 2560x1600, but my impression is that just looks like a flat out frame buffer limit, which is weird as the 4850 has the same 512MB to work with just as the GTX+ and 4870 do. Could even be an in-game bug, I honestly do not know. So just filter out 2560x1600 for the time being.

Though once a card runs out of it's framebuffer in AA modes it will need to swap back and forth the frame in memory causing colossal performance decreases, that theory does match the best.