HIS Radeon HD 5550 1GB GDDR3 Review

Synthetic Benchmarks

Unigine Heaven Benchmark

Recently Unigine produced the fantastic Heaven Benchmark. Based around a ficticious floating village the benchmark makes full use of the Direct X 11 API, most notably with the implementation of Hardware Tesselation. However with graphics cards of this calibre, we have the settings turned all the way down with many of these features (except DX11) disabled.

Err what's going on here? From the word go, it would seem that the HD 5550 is struggling to keep up with the HD 5670. To put these results into context, the HD 5550's average framerate is just 2fps more than the HD 5670's minimum and on average, the bigger brother is 69% faster. Is Unigine's Heaven benchmark just a blip in the charts? Let's continue

3DMark06

Futuremark's 3DMark06 is a means of testing a system's capability as a gaming machine.

Sadly the significant performance difference remains obvious in Futuremark's 3DMark06 suite, where the HD 5670 leads by 4000 marks overall.

3DMark Vantage

3DMark Vantage is Futuremarks flagship gaming oriented benchmark at present and is considered to be a demanding one at that. Our tests were carried out under the "Performance" prefix.

Our series of synthetic benchmarks ends on a fairly disappointing note. It would seem that the castration carried out on the HD 5550 core had more of an effect on performance than we initially believed. We all know that synthetic benchmarks sometimes exaggerate the true difference between graphcis cards, so let's see how the pair of cards perform in games.