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Sapphire HD 4870 Toxic Edition
DirectX 10.1
According to Microsoft:
One of the most exciting developments in Windows Vista is the groundbreaking graphics technology. Many of the newest Windows games take full advantage of the next-generation graphics technology in Windows Vista called DirectX® 10. DirectX® 10 provides an incredibly detailed experience for gamers of every type, and enables game creators to increase a game's level of realism, enhancing details and complexity in gaming worlds, apply effects like dynamic lighting and weather, and much more.
While Windows Vista is fully compatible with games and hardware that use older versions of DirectX®, the new DirectX® 10 features are available with a DirectX® 10 compatible graphics card and games designed to take advantage of this new technology. Adding a DirectX® 10 card to a PC running Windows Vista is like turbocharging your gaming experience. Existing games (most of which were written using DirectX® 9) get world class performance, while unlocking the new generation of gaming graphics with DirectX® 10 optimized games.
Because of this I’m going to be testing video games that both support DX10 (Crysis: Warhead) and two that don’t (CoD4 and HL2:EP2).
Crysis: Warhead
Take on the fight as the volatile Sergeant “Psycho” Sykes in a new parallel story taking place during the events of Crysis. Psycho’s secret mission will take him to the other side of the island on a ruthless pursuit of a North Korean general hell-bent on obtaining powerful technology. With the versatile powers of his Nanosuit and an arsenal of fully customizable weapons & vehicles at his disposal, Sykes will do whatever it takes to carry out his top-secret objective. Action on the other side of the island is more intense, the battles are fierce, and the mission protocol is no longer “Adapt to Survive”. As Sergeant Sykes, now you must adapt to dominate the battle. Twin SMG’s blazing, seizing new vehicles, or going stealth, the action and the victory is on your terms.
Benchmarking
In order to benchmark in Crysis I used a 3rd party program that is available for download at one of our affiliate’s websites. This program has a number of timedemos that it runs and scores your performance. The particular timedemo I chose is called Ambush. It has a lot of high detail lighting and environment textures meaning, it will strain even the best of video cards. Here are the settings that I locked down:
- Dx10
- 1280 x 1040 Resolution
- 3 trials per test
- Map: Ambush
- Default time of day (dawn in this case)
Here were the settings I modified during the different trials:
- Quality mode: Gamer (high) or Enthusiast (very high)
- Anti-aliasing: 0x or 8x
Finally the results:
If you were wondering what the GUI for the test program looked like here it is.
Next stop, Half Life 2: Episode 2.
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