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

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.