Crysis Warhead
We’ll lead off the testing with one of the most demanding games currently out: Crysis Warhead. Featuring the latest revision of Crytek’s lauded CryEngine, Crysis Warhead features lush outdoor environments, detailed, realistic enemies and explosive action, all rendered in impressive detail.
This test run takes us through the first part of the second level: Adapt or Perish. This level features large outdoor environments, vehicular combat, and detailed weather and heat-haze effects, giving us a good sample of what the game has to offer.
Crysis Warhead simplifies detail settings by grouping them into four presets: Minimum, Mainstream, Gamer, and Enthusiast, corresponding to the Low, Medium, High, and Ultra presets of Crysis. Testing at 1280×1024 yielded pleasantly smooth results at the Mainstream preset. The highest playable settings we could reach were at a resolution of 1680×1050, with anti-aliasing turned off and detail settings set at Mainstream. Attempts to raise detail levels to Gamer (high detail) resulted in hang-ups and graphical corruption, most likely due to the limited amount of texture memory available with this card’s 512MB of memory. Enabling anti-aliasing forces shader detail to Gamer, which degraded performance sufficiently to make the game unplayable, so it was left off. As you can see, framerates stayed around the 30fps mark for the length of the run in both tests, with overall performance being quite smooth. The brief downward dips represent reaching checkpoints in the level.
Half-Life 2: Episode Two
Next is the latest chapter in Valve Software’s enduringly popular Half-Life series, Half-Life 2: Episode Two. From the website:
As Dr. Gordon Freeman, you were last seen exiting City 17 with Alyx Vance as the Citadel erupted amidst a storm of unknown proportions. In Episode Two, you must battle and race against Combine forces as you traverse the White Forest to deliver a crucial information packet stolen from the Citadel to an enclave of fellow resistance scientists.
Featuring large outdoor areas, destructible buildings and spectacular High Dynamic Range lighting, Episode Two brings a new level of polish to the already outstanding Source engine
This test run takes us through the first part of the third level: Freeman Pontifex. Emerging from underground into a wide canyon, you fight alongside Alyx and a Vortigaunt against a never-ending stream of ant-lions as you attempt to reach the lift, only to be thwarted by the appearance of two antlion guardians, massive creatures that must be taken down bit by bit with multiple explosions.
As you can see, this game created no significant strain for this card, even with detail settings at maximum and 8x multi-sample anti-aliasing enabled.
Actually the 128bit memory interface can indeed compete with one using a 256bit interface depending upon many other factors like overall bandwidth, GPU power, memory type and amount.
I find it hard to believe that a card with a 128bit memory interface can compete with one with 256bit.
Actually, from what I can find, the 4770 ranges from $99-109, whereas the 4830 ranges from $74-109. The 4830 may not be in the same bracket now as when it was released, but it’s still got good bang for the buck.
its difficult to see why you’ve recommended this card, when a 4770 will outperform this one in all benchmarks, and is 10 $ cheaper at the very least.