Call of Duty 4
One of the most popular games of the year, Call of Duty 4 combines tightly-paced tactical action with a ripped-from-the-headlines story to present an engaging experience.
This test run focuses on the multiplayer aspect, going through a frenetic 5v5 multiplayer match as seen from the eyes of one of the participants. With grenades detonating everywhere, helicopter gunships laying into the combatants below with volleys of vulcan cannon fire, and airstrikes carving chunks out of the landscape, this run showed us everything CoD4 can throw at us.
Our test run at 1280×1024 with 4xAA and maximum detail settings yielded an outstanding average of 50 frames per second, while the run at 1680×1050 with the same settings produced a still-marvelous 40 fps average. Clearly, this card isn’t even breaking a sweat.
Unreal Tournament 3
Debuting to a somewhat mixed reception, Unreal Tournament 3 still manages to provide a best-of-the-old-school gaming experience. Combining the best aspects of Unreal Tournament and Unreal Tournament 2003/2004, UT3 gives us a high-flying, over-the-top multiplayer experience that provides a welcome change from the grimdark realism that pervades today’s top-tier FPSs. Given Unreal Engine 3’s prevalence in today’s games, this will give us a look at performance for a wide spectrum of games.
This test run takes us through the Warfare game mode, a mixture of control-the-objective and capture-the-flag gameplay that features large arenas, vehicular combat, and plenty of mayhem. The level chosen is Avalanche, one of the larger Warfare arenas in the game, set high in a frozen mountain pass. With large, detailed outdoor spaces and a constant flurry of snow, this level gives us a fair sampling of what this game can throw at us.
As of the current patch (v1.3), UT3 doesn’t support having both anti-aliasing and HDR lighting enabled at once. Given the importance of lighting to the game’s overall look, we chose to leave AA disabled for these tests. UT3 boils all of its detail settings down into just a few sliders, Screen Percentage, Texture Detail and World Detail. The oddly-named Screen Percentage actually provides a way to drop the resolution of the game world without lowering the screen resolution, something that is helpful for people on older PCs that want to stay at their monitor’s native resolution. For these tests, we set all sliders at maximum, and as you can see, performance was rock-solid, averaging in at 36fps for both tests.
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.