Benchmarks: 720p Gaming Performance
For those of you interested in how the Radeon HD 5570 and graphics cards like it perform at 720p (1280x720), we have run a few quick benchmarks using Wolfenstein and Far Cry 2.
Wolfenstein doesn't offer much in the way of adjustable quality settings, so we simply tested this game using the low and high quality presets. Far Cry 2 can only be tested using high quality presets when using the DX10 rendering method. Therefore we conducted a batch of testing using DX9 allowing us to use the medium quality preset.
Even at 1280x720 using low quality settings the Radeon HD 5450 managed just 34.7fps when testing with Wolfenstein, confirming our thoughts last week that this card is not suitable for true PC gaming. The Radeon HD 5570 on the other hand was capable of 77fps using high quality visuals telling quite the different story.
The Radeon HD 5570 struggled a bit more to run Far Cry 2 using DirectX 10 as we saw an average of 47.7fps at 1280x720. While this will provide playable performance, we ideally like to aim for an average of 60fps. I guess those rules can be bent a little when it's a sub-$100 GPU we are talking about.
Reducing the visual quality settings by using Far Cry 2's DX9 rendering mode saw the Radeon HD 5570 improving by a 55% margin. This further proves that new rendering modes such as DX11 are completely wasted on these budget graphics cards.