GTX 480 vs. HD 5870, 8x AA Performance Analysis, Part 3

NVIDIA has released its long awaited GeForce GTX based on its brand new Fermi DX11 GF100 architecture just over five weeks ago. We were able to bring you Part One of our GTX 480 series, “NVIDIA’s GTX 480 Performance Testing” here. We also brought you Part Two, “Overclocking”, here. We have had five weeks hand’s on experience testing our GTX 480 versus the HD 5870 and we have learned quite a bit more that we would like to share with you. We will now explore the relative performance hit of each card when we increase the anti-aliasing (AA) from 4x to 8x.

In Parts One and Two, we learned that the GTX 480 does indeed overclock.  For Part Two, we explored the performance of our overclocked GTX 480 (825/1100MHz) to our overclocked HD 5870 (975/1300MHz) and we added more benchmarks over Part One.  In this Part Three, we will look at the relative performance hit of 8xAA over 4xAA on each card, and we shall continue to add games as we progress through this series of GTX 480 vs. HD 5870. Part 4 is going to be after this coming week’s analysis of our overclocked “new” Powercolor HD 5870 PCS+ vs. our “old” reference Diamond HD 5870 and we shall upgrade to the latest drivers. Currently we are still using Catalyst 10-3a as it has been a long time between AMD’s graphics driver releases and Catalyst 10-4 was just released this week.

In Part One, we compared the relative performance of 5 GPUs – GTX 480, GTX 280, HD 5870, HD 4870-X2 and HD 4870. GTX 480 won most of the benchmarks just over HD 5870, followed by HD-4870-X2. The HD 4870 and our GTX 280 were left in the DX10 dust while the DX11 cards showed their advantages over a dual-GPU flagship card of the last generation. In Part Two, we compared relative overclocked-to-the-max performance of the GTX 480 to our overclocked HD 5870, and the GeForce pulled away even further from the Radeon.

We expect that NVIDIA will shortly launch it’s own entire DX11 line-up based on their GF100 “Fermi” architecture. We expect to see GTX 460 and 450 launch within a few weeks or months and we need to see what this new GF 100 Fermi architecture brings over their GT200b series besides DX11 and a smaller process. Increasing the anti-aliasing for our GTX 480 may give us some idea of GF100 scalability as NVIDIA brings out their entire line up.  Applying 8x AA was a weakness of the GT200 series – at least compared to their competitor, the Radeon 4000 series.  Let’s see how Fermi architecture fares with higher anti-alaising.

To properly bring you this review, we purchased a Diamond HD 5870 from NewEgg and put it through its paces with the very latest performance drivers – Catalyst 10-3a. AMD is quite proud of this driver set as it brings sold performance increases over Catalyst 10-2 and over even the last WHQL drivers, Catalyst 10-3.  Also, remember that AMD has had a long time to mature their drivers and that the latest GTX 480 GeForce 197.41 drivers that we are still using are their first WHQL drivers and they should leave some room for further performance improvement by NVIDIA’s GeForce driver team in the months to come.

Today you will see us pit our Diamond reference design HD 5870 which is now stock clocked against the new reference GTX 480 which is also at stock-clocks.  We will  benchmark sixteen modern games and two synthetic benchmarks ranging from 1680×1050 to 1920×1200 to 2560×1600 resolutions and with details fully maxed and with 16x anisotropic filtering (AF) applied.  Our main focus is the performance comparison between 4xAA and 8xAA on each video card.

In Part One of our GTX 480 performance evaluation we declared the GTX 480 the performance winner even though the performance was relatively close.  Part Two gave us a much clearer picture and we could see that the GTX 480 has superb overclocking headroom and awesome architectural potential.  This review is continuing on as a series and we believe that we have a much clearer picture by examining the performance hit of 8xAA over 4xAA.  Later on, we will also look at the individual features of each video card to see what else the new NVIDIA GPU brings to the table including CUDA applications such as 3D and GPU-assisted video encoding (as with Reveal/vReveal) as well as NVIDIA’s 3-panel Surround and other new features including 3D.

Here is AMD’s not-so-secret weapon to fight the new GTX 480 and please notice the free down-loadable copy of Call of Duty, Modern Warfare 2 bundled in with the PowerColor HD 5870 PCS+ as an incentive.  The PowerColor HD 5870+ is a mildly overclocked version of our reference HD 5870; 875/1225 MHz; up +25 MHz each on the core and memory clock. Worthy of note especially for smaller cases, the PowerColor HD 5870 PCS+ PCB is shorter and wider than reference and the cooling solution is also both quieter and more effective than the reference cooling solution.  This will be our upcoming review for next week and we shall compare our overclocked Diamond reference version against this one to see if our reference HD 5870 was limited in any way when we got to its most extreme overclock in Part Two of our series.

We already pointed out in Part 1 that it is practical to upgrade from HD 4870/GTX 280 class – which includes GTX 260, 275 and by extension, GTX 285. We also discovered that it is also logical to upgrade to DX11 from a HD 4870-X2 or HD 4870 CrossFire, or by extension, GTX 260 or 275 SLI or even a GTX 295 which is a bit more powerful than our HD 4870-X2. Since we do not want any chance of our CPU “bottlenecking” our graphics, we continue to test both of our graphics cards with our Intel Core i7 920 at 3.80 GHz (3.97 GHz effectively with the 21x multiplier in turbo mode), 6 GB Kingston DDR3 and a Gigabyte X58 full 16x + 16x PCIe CrossFire/SLI motherboard.

Later on we plan to also test our AMD DX11 video cards on AMD’s Dragon platform. We also acquired a brand new ECS black label A890GXM-A CrossFire motherboard which is a nice performance upgrade from our current Gigabyte 790X motherboard and we posted that review last week.

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Test Configuration

Test Configuration – Hardware

• Intel Core i7 920 reference 2.66 GHz and overclocked to 3.8 GHz); Turbo (21X multiplier for 3.97 GHz of a single core) is on.
• Gigabyte EX58-UD3R (Intel X58 chipset, PCIe 2.0 specification; CrossFire/SLI 16x+16x).
• 6 GB OCZ DDR3 PC 18000 Kingston RAM (3×2 GB, tri-channel at PC 16000 speeds; 2×2 GB supplied by Kingston)
• NVIDIA GTX 480, reference design (supplied by NVIDIA formerly under NDA)
• ATI Radeon HD 5870 (2GB, reference clocks) by Diamond
• Onboard Realtek Audio
• Two identical 250 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 hard drives configured and set up identically from drive image; one partition for NVIDIA GeForce drivers and one for ATI Catalyst drivers
• SilentPro 600 M power supply unit supplied by Cooler Master
• Cooler Master Gladiator 600 Case supplied by Cooler Master
• Noctua NH-U12P SE2 CPU cooler supplied by Noctua
• Four Case fans by Cooler Master and one Noctua NF-P14 FLX
  
• Philips DVD SATA writer
• HP LP3065 2560×1600 thirty inch LCD

Test Configuration – Software

• ATi Catalyst 10-3a; highest quality mip-mapping set in the driver, Catalyst AI set to “Standard”
• NVIDIA GeForce 197.41 WHQL drivers for GTX 4×0; High Quality
• Windows 7 64-bit; very latest updates
• DirectX February 2010
• All games are patched to their latest versions.
• vsync is off in the control panel and is never set in-game.
• 4xAA enabled in all games and “forced” in Catalyst Control Center for UT3; all in-game settings at “maximum” or “ultra” with 16xAF always applied if possible; 16xAF forced in control panel Crysis.
• All results show average, minimum and maximum frame rates except as noted.
• Highest quality sound (stereo) used in all games.
• Windows 7 64, all DX10 titles were run under DX10 render paths; DX11 titles under DX 11 render paths except for Dirt 2 demo in DX9c.

The Benchmarks

• Batman Arkham Asylum
• Just Cause 2
• Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
  
• Crysis
• Far Cry 2
• World in Conflict
• X3:Terran Conflict
• Dirt 2
• Left4Dead
• Lost Planet
• Unreal Tournament 3
• Resident Evil 5
• PT Boats
  
• ARMA2
• H.A.W.X.
• Battleforge
• Heaven 1.0 (Unigine)
• Heaven 2.0 (Unigine)

We dumped Vantage and added three more games – an old favorite, Enemy Territories: Quake Wars and two new games, Batman Arkham Asylum and Just Cause 2. We also added Heaven 2.0 to Part Two as a second synthetic benchmark because it uses extreme shaders and it may well portend the future of games with DX11’s most noticeable feature over DX10, tessellation. In fact, the Unigine Engine will be the basis for at least two new DX11 games this year, one of which is Primal Carnage – a dinosaur game.  Join us now as we explore the performance hit of 8xAA over 4xAA with both of our current competing top single-GPU video cards. Let’s move on to our 16 game benchmark suite as well as the two Unigine benchmarks as we explore the relative performance of the GTX 480 versus HD 5870 as they are each tested at 8xAA to see the relative framerate hit on each card.

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Batman AA

Batman: Arkham Asylum is an action-adventure/stealth video game based on DC Comics’ Batman.  Arkham Asylum as written by veteran Batman writer Paul Dini is based directly on the long-running comic book’s Dark Knight character.  The Joker devised an elaborate plot from inside Arkham Asylum that Batman is personally forced to put a stop to. The game’s primary characters are superbly voiced by the actors Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill and Arleen Sorkin who reprise their roles as Batman, the Joker and Harley Quinn. The game is played as an over-the-shoulder, third-person perspective action-adventure game with a primary focus on Batman’s combat abilities, stealth, detective skills and complete with an arsenal of gadgets that can be used in both combat and as exploring in “detective mode”.

The game uses a “Freeflow” combat system as well as the ability to use Batarangs and the Bat-Claw.  The player also has access to progressively stronger counter attacks as well as a special attack that can quickly take down a single foe.  Stealth tactics includes silent takedowns by sneaking up on foes including dropping and/or gliding from overhead perches.

Batman: Arkham Asylum uses a highly modified version of the Unreal Engine 3.  It does not support AA natively but must be added in and supported by the game’s developer.  Unfortunately we cannot compare Batman: Arkham Asylum using our GTX 480 directly against the HD 5870 with AA enabled.  Nor can we compare these two video cards with PhysX on.  Because of these unequal settings, we will have separate charts for each video card which are not to be compared against the other; and for the GTX 480, we will also show performance with PhysX on ‘high’ vs ‘off’.

Here we see the settings are different. Using the HD 5870, you will get a warning if you try to set Hardware Accelerated Physics to anything other than ‘off’. Ignoring the warning and setting our HD 5870 to the in-between “normal” physics setting, the frame rates are cut by almost 90% at 1680×1050 resolution – literally down from an average of 200 frames per second to about twenty!!

We also see that we need to set anti-aliasing in the ATI control panel to use it at all with our HD 5870 (above).  Of course, if we do that, we will get a much higher performance penalty with this “brute force” AA enhancement than we will with the GTX 480 as it is optimized to run with AA in-game by the developer.  Thus we do not compare the GTX 480 framerates to the HD 5870’s, but instead we look at the relative performance hit of each card; it will of course – in this case – be higher on the ATI card because of the way we have to force AA for it.  Note below that it is quite different with the GTX 480.  Look at the settings which also include enabling PhysX with little performance penalty (contrasted with the massive performance hit the Radeon suffers):

Now take a look at the difference in visuals between the Radeon with PhysX ‘off’ (first image) compared to the GTX 480 with PhysX on ‘high’.  We see no fog with the Radeon but will easily see the difference with the GeForce in the second image.

Now the GTX with ‘high’ PhysX.

There is quite a visual difference.  Now let’s look at the performance of each card, first with the HD 5870.

Now the GTX 480, first with no physics:

Now the GTX with ‘high’ physics:

It is as we predicted.  The GeForce is optimized to run with PhysX and takes a relatively small performance hit, remaining playable at the highest resolution and with 8xAA plus with every detail fully maxed out.  The Radeon cannot run with any physics without killing performance and there is a much higher performance hit by forcing AA in the control panel.  If you are going to play this game and you want the ultimate experience, you will need a GTX 4X0-based video card.

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Just Cause 2

Just Cause 2 is a 2010 sandbox-style action video game by Swedish developer Avalanche Studios and Eidos Interactive and is the sequel to the 2006 video game, Just Cause.  Just Cause 2 employs the Avalanche Engine 2.0 which an updated version of the engine used in the original and there are impressive visuals as it is made just for DX10.  It is set on the fictional tropical island of Panau in Southeast Asia. Rico Rodriguez returns as the protagonist who aims to overthrow the evil dictator “Baby” Panay and also to confront his former boss, rogue agent Tom Sheldon.  The game play is similar to that of its predecessor in that the player is free to roam the huge open world without a need to focus on the storyline.

The Just Cause 2 AI has been rewritten to use a planning system which enables the in-game enemies to do more and there is also more vertical game play as well as a manual aiming system that allows the player to target enemy NPC’s specific limbs.  Just Cause 2 also includes an adaptive difficulty system which scales as the player progresses.  There are also new weapons in Just Cause 2 which include launching laser-controlled rockets as well as several new vehicles including a Boeing 737.  Just Cause 2 now includes dual-grappling hooks which give players the ability to tether unlimited objects to each other including the tethering of enemies to vehicles and to each other which works very well as one of your goals is to cause maximum chaos.

We cannot compare Just Cause 2 performance with AA enabled on our GTX 480 directly against the HD 5870 as they use different kinds of AA in the official benchmark in the full retail game that we used. We always use the settings available to us in the game or demo benchmark tool with the exception of Unreal Tournament 3 and Crysis.

Here are the settings available to us on the Radeon; clearly 8xCSAA is impossible.  We also suspect the Radeon results may not be correct but we present our results anyway:

Notice that the HD 5870 (above) is supposedly running at 8xCSAA in the benchmark while it runs at 8xAA on the GTX 480 (below).  There are also extra settings that are available to the GTX 480 that are not available to the Radeon users.  We cannot compare the two card’s performance exactly to each other at 8xAA nor are we certain the HD 5870 is running it correctly.  We will investigate further in a later article.

First the benches with the GTX 480:

Now let’s look at the performance with the HD 5870 with slightly less stressful settings than for the GTX 480:

We can see the performance hit of 8xAA on the GTX 480 and the performance hit of on the HD 5870.  The respective percentage hits are detailed in the performance summary just before our conclusion.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is an objective-driven, class-based first person shooter set in the Quake universe. It was developed by id Software and Splash Damage and published by Activision. Quake Wars pits the combined human armies of the Global Defense Force against the technologically superior Strogg, an alien race who has come to earth to use humans for spare parts and food. It allows you to play a part, probably best as an online multi-player experience, in the battles waged around the world in mankind’s desperate war to survive.

Quake Wars is an OpenGL game based on id’s Doom3 game engine with the addition of their MegaTexture technology. It also supports some of the latest 3D effects seen in today’s games, including soft particles, although it is somewhat dated and less demanding on video cards than many DX10 games. id’s MegaTexture technology is designed to provide very large maps without having to reuse the same textures over and over again. For our benchmark we chose the flyby, Salvage Demo. It is one of the most graphically demanding of all the flybys and it is very repeatable and reliable in its results. It is fairly close to what you will experience in-game. All of our settings are set to ‘maximum’ and we also apply 4xAA/16xAF in game.

First we test at 2560×1600 resolution:

Now we test at 1920×1200 resolution:

Now at 1680×1050:

Both of these video cards have no trouble handling this game fully maxed out with 8xAA and at the highest resolution.  We do see however, that the Radeon has higher frame rates overall in this game although performance is very close at 8xAA.

CRYSIS

Next we move on to Crysis, a science fiction first person shooter by Crytek. It remains one of the most demanding games for any PC and it is also still one of the most beautiful games released to date. Crysis is based in a fictional near-future where an alien spacecraft is discovered buried on an island near the coast of Korea. The single-player campaign has you assume the role of USA Delta Force, ‘Nomad’ who is armed with futuristic weapons and equipment.

Crysis uses DirectX10 for graphics rendering. A standalone but related game, Crysis Warhead was released last year. CryEngine2 is the game engine used to power Crysis and Warhead and it is an extended version of the CryEngine that also powers FarCry. As well as supporting Shader Model 2.0, 3.0, and DirectX10’s 4.0, CryEngine2 is also multi-threaded to take advantage of dual core SMP-aware systems and Crytek has developed their own proprietary physics system, called CryPhysics. However, it is noted that actually playing this game is a bit slower than the demo implies.

GPU Demo, Island

All of our settings are set to maximum “very high” including 4xAA and we force 16xAF in the control panels.  To get equivalent anti-aliasing, we set our HD 5870 to 8xAA in the game’s Control Panel and 8xQ for the GeForce.  Here is Crysis’ Island Demo benchmark, first at 2560×1600 resolution:

Crysis at 2560×1600 still requires at least multi-GPU to play smoothly. At 4xAA, the HD 5870 and the GTX 480 are pretty close overall although the Radeon will stumble in the minimums  at times. Perhaps the larger framebuffer of the GTX makes a difference. However, once we set the filtering to 8x, the GTX simply pulls away from the Radeon which chokes badly. Neither of our overclocked video cards played this game at maximum resolution particularly well; not even without AA/AF – but this time the GTX 480 pulls way ahead of the HD 5870 when it is forced to play at 8xAA.

Let’s move on to 1920×1200:

This time the performance is closer with the Radeon edging the GeForce when both play Crysis at 8xAA. Both of our top cards are now playable with Crysis at 1920×1200 if you are willing to compromise with AA/AF or lower a couple of detail settings.

The Radeon HD 5870 is slightly faster than the GeForce GTX 480 when both are running at 4x or 8xAA in Crysis at 1680×1050. As the resolution approaches our maximum, the GTX 480 is now a bit faster in the minimums and averages until 2560×1600 when the HD 5870 chokes. We haven’t seen any performance improvement in NVIDIA’s Crysis drivers since the beta release drivers.

FarCry 2

Far Cry 2 uses the name of the original Far Cry but it is not connected to the first game as it brings you a new setting and a new story. Ubisoft created it based on their Dunia Engine. The game setting takes place in an unnamed African country, during an uprising between two rival warring factions. Your mission is to kill “The Jackal”; the Nietzsche-quoting mercenary that arms both sides of the conflict that you are dropped into.

The Far Cry 2 game world is loaded in the background and on the fly to create a completely seamless open world. The Dunia game engine provides good visuals that scale well. The Far Cry 2 design team actually went to Africa to give added realism to this game. One thing to especially note is Far Cry 2’s very realistic fire propagation by their engine that is a far cry from the scripted fire and explosions that we are used to seeing.

First let’s check out 2560×1600:

Here the GTX 480 takes an even more commanding lead over the HD 5870 when they are both tested at 8xAA. Clearly the GTX 480 runs away from the HD 5870 at our highest resolutions. Now we test Far Cry 2 benchmark at 1920×1200 – all of the resolutions that we test are with AI enabled.

We note that nowhere does the Radeon come close to the GTX 480’s performance in this game. Finally we test at 1680×1050 resolution:

Here we see a clean sweep by GTX 480 in Far Cry 2 – and when both run at 8xAA, the performance difference is magnified.

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World in Conflict

World In Conflict is set in an alternate history Earth where the Cold War did not end and Russia invaded the USA in 1989 and the remaining Americans decided to strike back. World in Conflict (WiC) is a real-time tactical/strategy video game developed by Massive Entertainment. Although it is generally considered a real-time strategy (RTS) game, World in Conflict includes gameplay typical of real-time tactical (RTT) games. WiC is filled with real vehicles from both the Russian and the American military. There are also tactical aids, including calling in massive bombing raids, access to chemical warfare, nuclear weapons, and far more.

Here is yet another amazing and very customizable and detailed DX10 benchmark that is available in-game or as a stand-alone. The particle effects and explosions in World in Conflict are truly spectacular! Every setting is fully maxed out.

We will note that there is no 8xAA setting for the HD 5870 in our demo’s benchmark, so we left it out; check out the settings for the HD 5870.

Now for the GTX 480 we see an additional AA setting that the HD 5870 does not have:

We start our benching at 2560×1600.

We cannot compare the HD 5870 at 8xAA but the GTX 480 certainly is solidly ahead at 4xAA and takes a relatively small performance hit when the setting is changed to 8xAA. World in Conflict is very playable at 2560×1600 on our GTX 480 even to very acceptable minimums under the game’s most demanding situations. Next we see the results at 1920×1200 resolution:

Again we see a very modest performance hit for the GTX 480 when the anti-aliasing is increased from 4x to 8xAA. Now we test at 1680×1050 resolution:

The GTX 480 delivers excellent performance all the way up to and including 2560×1600 with 8xAA. You probably want GTX 480 if you play a lot of World-in-Conflict at higher resolutions with your details and filtering fully maxed out.

X3: Terran Conflict

X3:Terran Conflict (X3:TC) is another beautiful stand-alone benchmark that runs multiple tests and will really strain a lot of video cards. X3:TC is a space trading and combat simulator from Egosoft and is the most recent of their X-series of computer games. X3:TC is a standalone expansion of X3: Reunion, based in the same universe and on the same engine. It complements the story of previous games in the X-Universe and especially continues the events after the end of X3: Reunion.

Compared to Reunion, Terran Conflict features a larger universe, more ships, and of course, new missions. The X-Universe is huge. The Terran faction was added with their own set of technology including powerful ships and stations. Many new weapons systems were developed for the expansion and it has generally received good reviews. It has a rather steep learning curve.

First we test at 2560×1600 resolution:

Nothing seems to help the minimums at 2560×1600. We see minimal performance hits from both video cards when they are set to run at 8xAA over 4xAA and their relative ranking remains unchanged; the GeForce is faster. Next we note the results at 1920×1200:

We see much the same results where the HD 5870 at 4xAA has the highest minimum but is edged out by the GTX 480 at 8xAA and also in the average and maximum frame rates. Now we test at 1680×1050:

Again we see a fairly tight grouping. However, all of our video cards perform well and all of them experience similar minimum framerates. Overall, the GTX 480 is slightly faster than the overclocked HD 5870 at 4xAA and at 8xAA although you will probably not really notice any difference actually playing this game.

DiRT 2 Demo – (DX9c)

Colin McRae: DiRT 2 is a racing game that was released in September 2009, and is the sequel to Colin McRae: Dirt. It includes many new race-events, including stadium events as your RV travels from one event to another in many real-world environments across four continents. Dirt 2 includes five different event types even allowing you to compete at new locations. It also includes a new multiplayer mode. Dirt 2 is powered by an updated version of the EGO engine which was featured in Race Driver: Grid. This updated EGO engine also features an updated physics engine.

We have been using the Dirt 2 demo to benchmark up until now as it works just as well as in the retail game – until you try to run DX11 on a NVIDIA DX11 card, in which case it reverts back to DX9c. Evidently the developer did not provide support for NVIDIA’s new DX11 card in the demo although the retail game has no such issues. Since we ran all of our tests with the Dirt 2 demo in Part One, it was too late to switch to the full game for this Part 2. We instead edited the configuration file so that the HD 5870 also ran on the DX9 pathway so that we could have a solid apples-to-apples comparison of performance across all of the cards. Later on, in further testing, will use the full retail game for the DX11 pathway as the visuals are better.

First we test our two video cards at 2560×1600:

The GTX 480 pulls ahead of the HD 5870 in a not so tight race when they are set at 4xAA and the GTX improves its lead when they are set to run with 8xAA. What about 1920×1200?

Again the GTX 480 leads and pulls even further ahead of the HD 5870 when they are both at 8xAA. So let’s look at the 1680×1050 results:

Dirt 2 gets the checkered flag with the GTX 480 on the DX9c pathway, especially as it is pushed to its 8xAA red line. We look forward to bringing you DX11 results in subsequent testing.

Left 4 Dead

Left 4 Dead (L4D) is a 2008 co-op first-person shooter that was developed by Turtle Rock Studios and purchased by Valve Corporation during its development. Left 4 Dead uses Valve’s proprietary Source engine .

Left 4 Dead is set in the aftermath of a worldwide pandemic which pits its four protagonists against hordes of the infected zombies. There are four game modes: a single-player mode in which your allies are controlled by AI; a four-player, co-op campaign mode; an eight-player online versus mode; and a four-player survival mode. In all modes, an artificial intelligence (AI), dubbed the “Director”, controls pacing and spawns, to create a more dynamic experience with increased replay value. It is best as a multiplayer game with humans.

There is no built in benchmark, so we used ABT Senior Editor BFG10K’s custom time demo which is very repeatable. The game is updated regularly by Steam and we chose the highest detail settings and 4xAA. First we test at 2560×1600 resolution.

Now the GTX 480 is beaten by HD 5870 although both cards give completely playable framerates at the highest resolution and with 8xAA.  We head on to our next chart at 1920×1200:

We note the same thing. Let’s move on to 1680×1050 resolution:

Generally, the HD 5870 takes the lead in Left 4 Dead and only is it beaten at 4xAA at 1680×1050. However, we note that for playing Source engine games, a HD 4870 or GTX 260+ is usually plenty.

Lost Planet

Lost Planet: Extreme Condition is a Capcom port of an Xbox 360 game. It takes place on the icy planet of E.D.N. III which is filled with monsters, pirates, big guns, and huge bosses. This frozen world highlights high dynamic range lighting (HDR) as the snow-white environment reflects blinding sunlight as DX10 particle systems toss snow and ice all around. The game looks great in both DirectX 9 and 10 and there isn’t really much of a difference between the two versions except perhaps shadows. Unfortunately, the DX10 version doesn’t look that much better when you’re actually playing the game and it still runs slower than the DX9 version.

We use the in-game performance test from the retail copy of Lost Planet and updated through Steam to the latest version for our runs. This run isn’t completely scripted as the creatures act a little differently each time you run it, requiring multiple runs. Lost Planet’s Snow and Cave demos are run continuously by the performance test and blend into each other.

Here are our benchmark results with the more demanding benchmark, Snow. All settings are fully maxed out in-game including 16xAF. Let’s start with 2560X1600 and compare the performance hit of each card when we increase the anti-aliasing from 4x to 8xAA.

We note a very tight grouping but the GeForce is beaten in the minimums and averages especially when the AA is increased to 8x.  However, neither card runs this game particularly well at 2560×1600 so now we test at 1920×1200 resolution:

The Radeon is a little faster overall at 4xAA setting but it beats the GeForce in the minimums when 8xAA is applied to both cards.  Finally we test at 1680×1050:

It is finally playable at 8xAA with both cards at 1680×1050 but the HD 5870 wins the duel in Lost Planet overall.

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Unreal Tournament 3 (UT3)

Unreal Tournament 3 (UT3) is the fourth game in the Unreal Tournament series. UT3 is a first-person shooter and online multiplayer video game by Epic Games. Unreal Tournament 3 provides a good balance between image quality and performance, rendering complex scenes well even on lower-end PCs. Of course, on high-end graphics cards you can really turn up the detail. UT3 is primarily an online multiplayer title offering several game modes and it also includes an offline single-player game with a campaign.

For our tests, we used the very latest 1.5 game patch for Unreal Tournament 3, released after its ‘Titan’ pack. The game doesn’t have a built-in benchmarking tool, so we used FRAPS and did a fly-by of a chosen level. Here we note that performance numbers reported are a bit higher than compared to in-game. The map we use is called “Containment” and it is one of the most demanding of the fly-bys. Our tests were run at resolutions of 1920 x 1200 and 1680 x 1050 with UT3’s in-game graphics options set to their maximum values.

One drawback of the way the UT3 engine is designed is that there is no support for anti-aliasing built in so we forced 4xAA in each vendor’s control panel. We record a demo in the game and a set number of frames are saved in a file for playback. When playing back the demo, the game engine then renders the frames as quickly as possible, which is why you will often see it playing it back more quickly than you would actually play the game. Here is Containment Demo, first at 2560×1600:

The GeForce is faster although both cards play this game well at absolutely maxed out settings at our maxed out resolution. Now we test at 1920×1200:

Same thing but closer results when we drop the resolution and finally we test at 1680×1050:

There is absolutely no problem playing this game fully maxed out with any of our older graphics cards such as HD 4870 or GTX 280, never mind GTX 480 and HD 5870 providing overkill framerates. However, the GTX 480 wins in the Unreal Tournament 3 arena with 8x or 4xAA applied.

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Resident Evil 5

Resident Evil 5 is a survival horror third-person shooter developed and published by Capcom that has become the best selling single title in the series. The game is the seventh installment in the Resident Evil series and it was released for Windows in September 2009. Resident Evil 5 revolves around two investigators pulled into a bio-terrorist threat in a fictional town in Africa.

Resident Evil 5 features online co-op play over the internet and also takes advantage of NVIDIA’s new GeForce 3D Vision technology. The PC version comes with exclusive content the consoles do not have. The developer’s emphasis is in optimizing high frame rates but they have implemented HDR, tone mapping, depth of field and motion blur into the game. Re5‘s custom game engine, ‘MT Framework’, already supports DX10 to benefit from less memory usage and faster loading. Resident Evil 5 gives you choice as to DX10 or DX9 and we naturally ran the DX10 pathway.

There are two benchmarks built-into Resident Evil 5. We chose the fixed benchmark. Here it is at 2560×1600:

The HD 5870 at 8xAA reverses the situation at 4xAA and passes the GTX 480.  However, neither card has any issues playing this game fully maxed out at this high resolution. Here are the results at 1920×1200 resolution:

Now the GTX 480 is faster all around at 1920×1200.  So, let’s check out 1680×1050:

The overclocked GTX 480 is able to turn in good performance in Resident Evil 5 beating the HD 5870 but both cards play it very well.

PT Boats: Knights of the Sea

PT Boats: Knights of the Sea is a stand-alone DX10 benchmark utility released by Akella. It is actually a tech demo of their upcoming simulation-action game. This DX10 benchmark test runs reliably and apparently provides very accurate and repeatable results.

We set the only settings options available to us as follows:

DirectX Version: DirectX 10

Resolution: 2560×1600, 1920×1600 and 1680×1050 at 60 Hz

Image Quality: High

Anti aliasing: 4x or 8x MSAA

Here are the results of the PT Boats DX10 benchmark, first at 2560×1600 resolution. Unfortunately our HD 5870 would not run this benchmark reliably with the 10-3a drivers and would often hang at the load screen. So we present the comparison of 4x versus 8x AA with the GTX 480, first at 2560×1600.

Now at 1920×1200:

Now at 1680×1050 resolution:

We see the 8xAA performance hit is pretty even across all the resolutions, increasing as it goes higher.

ARMA 2

ARMA 2 is taken from the third installment in their series of realistic modern military simulation games from Bohemia Interactive. It features a player-driven story with more than 70 weapons and over 100 different vehicles. With a game world of 225 square km that is taken from actual surveillance photos, you can expect truly massive online battles with five distinct armed groups to choose from.

ARMA2 can be considered a tactical shooter where the player commands a squad of AI – or many squads – with elements of real-time tactics. ARMA 2 Demo was released in late June, 2009 and coming in at 2.6 GB, the ARMA 2 demo allows you to experience the same game play that is featured in the full version of ARMA 2 – including multiplayer, as well as a few of the vehicles, weapons and units. The ARMA2 demo also contains a part of Chernarus terrain, a small section of the full game world set in the fictional “Black Russia”.

We see that there is no option in the demo to run the HD 5870 at 8xAA (first image) as there is for the GTX 480 (second image).

In previous testing, there was always a massive performance hit on any DX10/10.1 card when maximum details are enabled at the resolutions that we test; AA is set to “high” for the HD 5870 but we cannot get 8xAA so we do not attempt to test it here. Let’s see how our GTX 480 does with ARMA 2 at 2560×1600 when the AA is cranked up to 8x.

It loses a few FPS with the higher anti-aliasing and is unplayable at these settings.  Let’s check out 1920×1200:
We see the same thing; a reasonable performance hit when the GTX 480 is challenged by 8xAA.  ARMA 2 is still unplayable at this detail setting and resolution.  What about 1680×1050?

The GTX 480 again takes a performance hit when AA is increased from 4x to 8x, but you would really want GTX 480 SLI to play this game at our settings.

Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X.

Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. is an air combat video game developed by Ubisoft Romania and published by Ubisoft for Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. It was released in United States on March 6, 2009. You have the opportunity to fly 54 aircraft over real world locations and cities in somewhat realistic environments that are created with satellite data. This game is a more of a take on flying than a real simulation.

The game story takes place during the time of Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. H.A.W.X. is set in the year 2014 where private military companies have replaced government-run military in many countries. The player is placed into the cockpit as an elite ex-military pilot who is recruited by one of these corporations to work for them as a mercenary. You later return to the US Air Force with a team as you try to prevent a full scale terrorist attack on the United States which was started by your former employer.

Let’s check out H.A.W.X. at 2560×1600:

Nothing in the ranking changes from 4x to 8xAA as the GTX 480 flies away from its competition although both cards play the game really well at the highest resolution. Here are our results at 1920×1200 resolution:

Now let’s look at 1680×1050:

H.A.W.X. is clearly fastest on the GTX 480 with any level of detail or AA or at any resolution we have tested. Let’s move on to a DX11 online game, BattleForge.

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BattleForge

BattleForge is an online PC game developed by EA Phenomic and published by Electronic Arts. The full game and a demo was released in March 2009. BattleForge is a card based RTS that revolves around acquiring and winning by means of micro-transactions for buying new cards. By May, 2009, BattleForge became a Play 4 Free game with fewer cards than the retail version. BattleForge supports Directx 11 with full support for hardware tessellation. It is very impressive visually and quite demanding on any system.

First we test with our two cards at 2560×1600 using the BattleForge built-in benchmark with all of its settings completely maxed out and with 4xAA and 8xAA:

The GTX 480 is simply faster than the HD 5870; the GTX 480 apparently also suffers less of a performance hit with 8xAA.

Again, the GTX 480 clearly leads. Now at 1680×1050 resolution:

The GTX 480 wins the war, so far in BattleForge.

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Heaven benchmark, Unigine Engine

Now we test the synthetic Heaven 1.0 benchmark based on the Unigine engine. It uses DX11 and fairly heavy tessellation which will strain any graphics card. Here are the settings we used for this benchmark (we checked ‘full-screen’).

Here is our benchmark run at 2560×1600. The HD 5870 occasionally produces a slideshow with 8xAA; the GTX 480 is definitely faster at extreme tessellation but it is no pleasure to watch it also struggle:

Now we look at 1920×1200:

And finally we run the benchmark at 1680×1050:

It won’t be until later this year that we will see our first DX11 games based on the Unigine Engine. For what it is worth, GTX 480 excels in this benchmark.

Let’s just include Heaven 2.0 with Heaven 1.0 as they are both Unigine engine; version 2.0 is using much more extreme tessellation with nicer visuals as a result.

Heaven 2.0

There will be at least two DX11 games based on Unigine that will be released later on this year. And there is the latest and even more stressful Unigine 2.0 benchmark and the settings we used:

As you can see there is a setting for “extreme tessellation”. We will tell you right now that this test chokes the GTX 480 at the highest settings but it is still better than the slide show the Radeon HD 5870 manages. However, the visuals are also extraordinary. Here are the results at 2560×1600:

The GTX 480 takes a relatively small performance hit when 8xAA is applied compared to the HD 5870 which just chokes.  And now we look at 1920×1200:

And finally we check out 1680×1050:

Of course, this is a synthetic test based on a game engine that has yet to see a PC game that uses it in retail. But it is worth noting the tessellation capabilities of the GTX 480 and its performance with 8xAA.

Performance Summary Chart

GeForce Drivers are 197.17 (release) and 197.41 WHQL (latest; tested 4x vs. 8x AA)

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Conclusion

This conclusion is a short one and it dictates itself just as the last one did. The HD 5870 still maintains good 8x AA performance as did the HD 4000 series and it will in many cases catch the stock GTX 480 or surpass it when performance is already reasonably close. However, the GTX 480 also turns in respectable 8xAA numbers – especially compared to the weakness of the last GT200 series.  We see the GTX 480 run even further away from the HD 5870 in some new games with 8xAA enabled. This bodes very well for GF100 Fermi architecture and indicates that NVIDIA has very solid scalable new architecture to build on although it is still on an improving process.

We look forward to seeing what NVIDIA its partners have in store with future variants of GTX 480 and the rest of the Fermi GeForce family. We also look forward to AMD’s response beyond overclocking its current HD 5870. This has been quite an enjoyable five-week hand’s on experience for us in comparing GTX 480 versus HD 5870 and with each video card solidly overclocked and now tested at 8xAA.

We feel privileged to bring you our very first overclocked benchmarks and performance testing of GTX 480 versus HD 5870. We like it so much so that we will make this a series until we have covered this subject in depth. Next up, we take a break from this series as we explore the new PowerColor HD 5870 PCS+ and pit it against our reference Diamond HD 5870 and we also overclock each card.  As we return to Part Four, we also expect to explore GTX 480 SLI versus HD 5870 CrossFire and NVIDIA’s claims of incredible scaling to 90% or so under Windows 7.

In the meantime, feel free to comment below, ask questions or have a detailed discussion in our ABT forum. If you have any requests on what you would like us to focus on for Part Four, or for any other information, please join our ABT forum.

Mark Poppin

ABT Senior Editor

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«1. Introduction2. Test Configuration3. Batman: AA4. Just Cause 25. Enemy Territories: Quake War6. Crysis7. Far Cry 28. World in Conflict9. X3 - Terran Conflict10. Dirt 211. Left 4 Dead12. Lost Planet13. UnrealTournament314. Resident Evil 515. PT Boats16. ARMA217. H.A.W.X.18. BattleForge19. Heaven 1.0 & 2.020. Performance Summary Chart21. Conclusion22. View All»