Benchmark Results: Far Cry 2
With frame rates smooth all the way through 1920x1200, Far Cry 2 shows the Radeon HD 4770 beating ATI’s Radeon HD 4850 in all three tested resolutions. The new $109 card and Nvidia’s GTS 250 trade blows, hanging close everywhere but price.
Turn on the eye candy and Nvidia’s GeForce establishes an advantage—likely a result of the 1 GB frame buffer.
Yet again, at each resolution, the Radeon HD 4770 usurps ATI’s own Radeon HD 4850. Really? A 640-shader GPU besting an 800-shader chip? What’s up with that? The HD 4770’s advantages are Z fill rate and pixel fill rate—in every other spec-sheet comparison the 4850 is superior—compute performance, texture fill rate, memory bandwidth. We pressed ATI for an answer, and the company confirms that there are instances like this where the 4770’s architecture gives it an advantage over the 4850. Moving forward, however, it expects the 1 GB Radeon HD 4850 to be more popular. That extra frame buffer would likely give it the advantage. Now that the Radeon HD 4770 is spoiling the 512 MB 4850 card’s performance story, we believe it.
