AMD Radeon HD 4770 CrossFire Review

Crysis: Warhead

We are using the full version of Crysis: Warhead. We will be playing Warhead with the latest patches installed in 64-bit. We are playing the entire “Train” level. Our run-through starts off with us getting on the train, manning the gun turrets, and blowing up everything along the way as the train progresses down the tracks. We stop at the tower, perform the mission there, and continue on until the end.

Highest Playable Settings

Crysis: Warhead is no stranger to demanding a lot from our video cards. The Radeon HD 4770 struggles, but does allow us to maintain the quality setting of “Gamer” in one of the most important graphics options in the game, Shader Quality. Other than that, and the Water quality, we had to set everything else to “Mainstream” at 1680×1050 with No AA-16X AF in order to achieve a playable experience.

Unlike Arma II, Crysis: Warhead does utilize multi-GPU configurations more efficiently, at least compared to Arma II. Compared to other games even Crysis: Warhead doesn’t scale as well as some other games like FarCry 2, or Fallout 3 or Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood. Still, there are real-world gameplay improvements with Radeon HD 4770 CrossFire in Crysis: Warhead. We were able to raise the resolution up to 1920×1200 with No AA and 16X AF with Radeon HD 4770 CrossFire. We were also now able to raise every in-game option up to “Gamer.” These increases in visual quality great improved our gameplay experience.

The AMD Radeon HD 4890 one upped Radeon HD 4770 CrossFire by allowing us to enable 2X AA at 1920×1200. Other than that, the settings were the same. Though it looks like there is room in performance for HD 4770 CrossFire to enable AA here, it is limited by its memory capacity and memory performance. When we enabled 2X AA we experienced choppy performance throughout the game in various scenarios. It just wasn’t able to do it smooth enough unfortunately.

Apples to Apples

In our apples-to-apples testing we set all video cards to 1680×1050 with No AA and 16X AF. We set all in-game options to the highest “Enthusiast” level to stress shader performance.

When you take the memory dependencies out of the equation, and focus on pure shader performance, such as this test shows, the AMD Radeon HD 4770 CrossFire actually performs ever so slightly faster than the Radeon HD 4890. It isn’t by a whole lot, but it is measurable in this scenario of stressing shader performance.