Testing (continued):
Company of Heroes - Opposing Fronts:
Company of Heroes is a World War II themed 3D game that also includes a benchmark for testing the DirectX 10 capabilities of your system as it relates to game play. With the settings on high, a resolution of 1280x1024, and 4x anti-aliasing, it was executed on all of the cards. Results in terms of minimum, maximum, and average frame rate values are provided, and higher is better for all three.
We once again see a set of results that really doesn't distinguish the Toxic card from its stock speed counterpart. Fractions of a frame per second separate the two HD4870 cards, and even the Toxic HD4850 is right up there in the mix.
Call of Juarez:
Call of Juarez is a wild west themed 3D game, and yet another to offer a benchmark for analyzing DirectX 10 performance. The results are provided in terms of minimum, maximum, and average frame rate values, and higher is better for each. The results below were achieved with the system set to a resolution of 1280x1024, 4x anti-aliasing, and high settings.
The results finally get interesting with this game. The average frame rate value for the Toxic Radeon HD4870 is about 6% higher than the stock speed HD4870, and about 24% higher than the Toxic HD4850's.
After getting through this test I decided to double back and re-evaluate the first three benchmarks bundled with 3D games to see why the margin of victory wasn't as good as was seen in Call of Juarez. The scores were generally so close despite the factory overclock, that I wanted to see if anything was hindering its performance. I defragmented the hard drive for good measure, and even then the scores didn't improve. Don't get me wrong, the Toxic Radeon HD4870 put up some great numbers, I suppose I was just looking for a bit more. The bottom line seems to be that a 4% GPU overclock isn't particularly noticeable in games, and the 11.1% faster memory is just about a non-factor.
