![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Monday , July 27, 2009
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
XFX Radeon HD 4770
We take our first look at a full retail boxed version of the Radeon HD 4770 from XFX. We’ll test its overclocking ability, take its temperature, and see what kind of performance it puts out while taking it for a spin around the block in real world gameplay testing. This dual-slot Radeon HD 4770 has a lot to offer at an attractive price.
Demigod
During our play-testing, we found that the "Mandala" arena presented the most challenge to our graphics cards. It is a large arena, capable of supporting five on five player games. For our evaluation procedure, we loaded up the "Mandala" arena with ourselves plus five AI opponents. We chose the Rook player for our use, and on our team added the Queen of Thorns and Unclean Beast demigods. For the opposing team, we selected the Sedna, Regulus, and Oak demigods. We disabled the Fog of War, because we found that added load of all the demigods, opposing minions, and their buildings to be more demanding than the fog effect. For the game mode, we chose Conquest, which required that we destroy the opposing team’s citadel for victory. Our test play lasts about five minutes; since performance does not diminish the longer we played any given arena.
Highest Playable Settings
Demigod played very well on both video cards. For a low price you get a lot of performance out these two video cards in this game. We were able to take Demigod up to 1920x1200 with no less than 4X AA and the highest in-game settings on both the XFX Radeon HD 4770 and GeForce GTS 250. Performance at this level was nearly identical between them, with absolutely no noticeable differences.
In fact, if you are only able to play at a lower resolution, such as 1680x1050 you will find that 8X AA is playable as well on both video cards. This means you will get very crisp and clear image quality at a low resolution, removing aliasing. Going higher to 2560x1600 was pushing it for both these video cards. For some, 2560x1600 with No AA may seem playable, but the image quality drop by disabling AA is noticeable on some of the characters when you are zooming in and out on the maps. We felt 1920x1200 with 4X AA provided the best balance of performance and image quality here. There were no differences between the 4770 or GTS 250.
Apples to Apples
In our apples-to-apples testing we set both video cards at 1920x1200 at 8X AA to really push them graphically. At this higher AA setting we can see the XFX Radeon HD 4770’s superior antialiasing efficiency pulling through and providing faster average framerates. Still, performance is rather close between both cards.