![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Tuesday , April 28, 2009
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Mark Warner
- Google +1
AMD Radeon HD 4770
Cheap price, low power, and an enjoyable gameplay experience, all of this is possible in AMD’s new Radeon HD 4770 launching today. We will take the HD 4770 for a spin in six games and compare it to a NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250. You’ll be surprised at the level of gameplay possible for around $100 these days.
Burnout Paradise
Burnout Paradise has been an incredibly popular game on consoles. Now, with the PC version: Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box, that great driving experience has been brought to the PC, as probably one of the best driving games out there. The graphics are visually appealing in this game, based on DirectX 9 but using features such as HDR, shadows, day/night time change and high resolution textures. We will simply be racing in this game for ten minutes making sure to do stunts, blast through bill boards and just simply play the game like it is meant to be played.
Highest Playable Settings
Note – This game has a 60 FPS cap that cannot be overcome, even with VSYNC disabled.
Burnout Paradise plays surprisingly well on both video cards here. We were able to take a near $100 video card up to 2560x1600 with 2X AA enabled and maintain smooth gameplay! This is really quite a feat. We had all in-game settings at the highest levels and forced AF from the control panel and were floored when this game played so well at these settings on the Radeon HD 4770. Alternatively, we also found 1920x1200 with 8X AA playable! Yep, at 1920x1200 with 8X AA it was very fast, our average framerate was 57.2, yes 57.2 FPS at 1920x1200 8X AA on the Radeon HD 4770.
The GeForce GTS 250 was also playable at 2560x1600 with 2X AA and produced higher framerates overall. The thing is, we were not able to raise the AA level to 4X AA with this available higher framerate. When we set it to 4X AA at 2560x1600 performance became choppy and unplayable on the GTS 250, so 2X AA was the highest level that was playable. Alternatively this video card was also playable at 1920x1200 with 8X AA.
In this situation we find that the GTS 250 does produce higher framerates, but that did not translate into a better gameplay experience.
Apples to Apples
In our apples-to-apples testing we set both video cards at 1920x1200 at 8X AA and here are the results. You can see that both are incredibly fast at this setting. The GTS 250 is edging out slightly in performance, but at these framerates does it really matter?