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Call of Duty 4 Call of Duty 4, although only a DirectX 9 game, has been one of my favorites over the last year, and still very popular online, making it still a worthy benchmark. In this bench, I test using the "Shock and Awe" mission from the single player campaign, since it probably the easiest to reproduce. All our settings are maxed out, including 4xAA, and was run at 1920x1200.
Call of Duty 4 also performs remarkably well, with a minimum frame rate of 64, a max of 185, and an average framerate of 119. Very impressive. Power One of the minor considerations when purchasing a gamer's graphics card is power consumption. A lower power consuming card can save the end consumer some money buy allowing for a cheaper power supply, and saving a few cents on the power bill. In order to test, I used a Kill-A-Watt Power Meter to measure power usage at Idle and Load conditions. Idle is defined as sitting at the Windows desktop, load is defined as running Prime95 and Crysis bench tool at maximum settings simultaneously:
While there is no doubt that the 4870X2 is the most powerful single card on the planet, you pay for it in power consumption. The 4850X2 is much more miserly, consuming 95W less watts under load conditions.
Conclusion There is no doubt the pricing of this card was meant to attack the GTX-280 in the market yet again, and I would say it does a pretty good job. For a 5% higher price, you get roughly that much better performance; in some cases more, in some cases less. I think that it is safe to say that this card "beats" the GTX-280, even if it is not by a huge margin. It will be very interesting to see how future drivers will affect the Far Cry 2 performance, as well as hopefully clean up the performance in the Warhead bench. The reduced power consumption and extra DVI are definitely nice features, which I am sure will help with it's perceived value, and I am glad Sapphire decided to mix things up with their heatsink. The fans performed admirably during testing, with little noise to speak of. The heatsinks that sit on both sides of the card do get rather warm, so adequate air flow in the case will definitely be a must. In all, the cooling solution isn't perfect but it does definitely get the job done. In general, Sapphire and ATi have themselves yet another winner that will help them fill out their product offerings in the high end gaming segment, and I am excited to see how this will force the prices of the competition to come down.
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