Date:
Monday , November 23, 2009
Author:
Matthew Krysiak
Editor:
Brent Justice
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PowerColor HD5770 Video Card Review

Think your old GeForce GTX 260 or Radeon HD 4870 is getting a little long in the tooth? They’ve both had a great run, but now it might be time to upgrade. We see how these two video cards compare to the brand new PowerColor HD5770.

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Need for Speed: Shift

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Need for Speed: Shift is the next title in the Need for Speed franchise. This new game completely changes gameplay compared to the previous titles. The new NFS: Shift is a DirectX 9 game, but employs the latest DX9 graphical features such as HDR, depth of field, motion blur, high quality shadows, multisample AA on alpha textures, and crisp high quality textures. For our manual run-through, we will drive on the Nordschleife track, which is 12+ miles long and lasts 10 minutes. We have enabled 15 opponents to really burden the system, and the time of day set is Midday. To find out more about Need for Speed: Shifts graphic’s options check out our gameplay review.

Highest Playable Settings

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In Need for Speed: Shift the PowerColor HD5770 and the HD 4870 1GB shared the highest playable settings out the three video cards: 1920x1200, 8X AA, 16X AF, and the highest in-game settings. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 was also playable at 1920x1200, 16X AF, and the highest in-game settings but with no AA. In fact, turning any AA on with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260, even 2X, caused our framerates to drop into the high teens. This is surprising since we have an average of 78.2 FPS without it.

Apples-to-Apples

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For our Need for Speed: Shift apples-to-apples comparison we are using 1920x1200, 4X AA, 16X AF, and the highest in-game settings. Here we see what happens on the GeForce GTX 260 when we turned AA on. At 4X AA our framerates stayed in-between the 15 and 20 FPS range the whole time, while the other two video cards both were able to stay well above the 30 FPS line.

Image Quality

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With both the PowerColor HD5770 and the ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB we can see how much 8X AA helps by looking at things like the overpass when compared to the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 with no AA.