Benchmark Results: High Detail With 4x Anti-Aliasing
Both the Radeons and GeForces demonstrate a similar level of quality when 4x AA is enabled:
Here we see the CPU limitation we're so used to in this game. The Radeon HD 4650 is knocked out of the competition, but the rest of the cards are still in the game.
At 1680x1050, we're beginning to see a slight advantage trend in favor of the ATI cards.
At 1920x1200, the Radeons increasingly show their strength when AA is enabled. The GeForce 9600 GT is still demonstrating playable performance, but for some reason the GeForce 8800 GT sample is struggling, even though we re-ran the tests to see if it was an anomaly.
At the highest 2560x1600 resolution, we're seeing some problems. At first glance I wondered if some cards were suffering from some sort of driver glitch, but Chris Angelini pointed out the elephant in the room: all of the cards that failed to produce playable performance at this setting are the 512 MB cards. The 796 MB and 1 GB cards are all able to produce much higher performance numbers at this high resolution with 4x anti-aliasing. In any case, the Radeon HD 4870 1GB walks away with a win as the only single card we've tested that is powerful enough to play the game at this resolution and AA level smoothly. The GeForce GTX 260 is on the razor's edge of playability and could be used at these settings if the player found it acceptable.
