Benchmark Results: H.A.W.X. 2
H.A.W.X. 2 is an interesting title for us to test because of the controversy surrounding it. Nvidia suggests that the level of tessellation in the game is appropriate, while AMD counters that it is set to unnecessarily high levels in order to show a GeForce advantage.
We’ve decided to play with this one a little bit by forcing a specific tessellation level in the Radeon 5770 driver. We set it to 4x, an amount that we feel delivers the same visual experience as the application setting. Admittedly, we’ve set this level after casually watching the benchmark—no screenshots were taken to objectively measure the difference in tessellation—but from this perspective we think the visual quality is comparable during a real-world game play situation.
Will the lowered tessellation launch the Radeon HD 5770 into new heights of performance?
Not at all. The slight difference in frame rate doesn’t even push the Radeon HD 5770 to GeForce GTX 450 performance levels. It certainly does seem that this title favors GeForce cards. H.A.W.X. 2 is an actual game title and not a synthetic benchmark, so the result is valid.