ATI Radeon HD 4770 Review

Synthetic Benchmarks

Futuremark’s 3DMark series of benchmarks are the darling benchmarks of the enthusiast crowd. Although they don’t provide real world gameplay indication, they are still a good indicator of system performance and can help determine if something is wrong.

3DMark06 is a PC benchmark suite designed to test the DirectX9 performance of your graphics card. 3DMark06 is the most downloaded benchmark and the ORB database of 3DMark 06 results, maintained by Futuremark, now contains over 8.5 million 3DMark06 benchmark scores from around the world. Three main graphic tests from 3DMark05 were carried over to 3DMark06 and updated. The tests included in 3DMark 06 feature HDR rendering, shadow mapping, water surfaces created using pixel shaders with HDR refraction, HDR reflection, depth fog and Gerstner wave functions, heterogeneous fog, light scattering and cloud blending, etc.

3DMark Vantage is a PC benchmark suite designed to test the DirectX10 performance of your graphics card. It is the latest addition to the 3DMark series. As it is a DX10-only benchmark, it only runs on Windows Vista and Windows 7. 3DMark Vantage is composed of four full-bore benchmarking tests (2 CPU tests and 2 GPU tests) and 6 feature tests. This test makes good use of multi-core CPUs and can even use Nvidia’s PhysX technology on its GeForce lineup of video cards.

Note: PhysX on GeForce cards was disabled in Nvidia Control Panel.

With a crippled 128-bit bus, you might not expect HD 4770 to be much of a card when compared to cards with 256-bit memory bus. But the GDDR5 balances out things in the end. Here we see HD4770 almost beat the GTS 250 in 3DMark 06 and picking up the top spot in 3DMark Vantage.