Testing – Gaming
Keep in mind that the Radeon HD 5670 is not a gaming card. It is a mainstream graphics card, which traditionally have meant graphics better than onboard, but not capable of any kind of decent gaming. The Radeon HD 4670 did a better-than-expected job of gaming, and even gave some AA goodness if you could handle FPS in the mid-20s. (Crysis) With the improved performance we saw in the Futuremark testing, we should expect the same increases in gaming.
Crysis: Though over two years old now, Crysis is still my favorite gaming benchmark. I’ve found no other game that pushes the processor and memory so much, and still is very VGA intensive. The Radeon HD 4670 performed surprisingly well with Crysis, and I expect no less from the HD 5670. The extra memory should make a difference here too. I used the Crysis Benchmark Tool by Boris Vergiza, settings were Medium, 2 x AA, GPU benchmark, DX10, 64-bit, 1280 x 1024.
I also ran Crysis in my earlier testing at no AA. I thought that I’d do that with the HD 5670 too, since I still feel that one shouldn’t expect to be able to run AA successfully with a sub-$100 video card. I used the same settings as above but with no AA.
PT Boats: Knights of the Sea: I like the PT Boats benchmark because there are some hard camera angle changes in the video that really pushes the GPU. Like Crysis, the benchmark prefers a powerful system with a strong video card. The HD 4670 did ok but marginal, let’s see how the HD 5670 does. I used the standalone benchmark, settings were Medium, 2 x AA, 1280 x 1024.
