Radeon HD 5770 in 3-way CrossfireX review

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VGA performance: Call of Duty 5: World at War (DX9)

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 its 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

In recent previous tests we already noticed that with Call of Duty 5 we are running into a bottleneck, aka the CPU. 3 GPUs require more CPU load/cycles than two, as a result in 3-way Crossfire the results are even slightly slower.

Now the 3 GPUs themselves are faster, they are just waiting on the CPU to serve the graphics driver its dataset.

So once we collect all cards at 1920x1200 @ 4x AA it paints this picture. Would we have used say a 5 GHz Core i7 processor, the 3-way Crossfire results would very likely position themselves properly. So please understand this has nothing to do with ATI's drivers or cards.

The system (Core i7 @ 3.75 GHz) is a bottleneck for the 3-way setup and as you can see, all other high-end graphics cards.

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