Sapphire 4890 Vapor-X PCIe Graphics Card
Crysis is without doubt one of the most visually stunning and hardware-challenging games to date. By using CrysisBench – a tool developed independently of Crysis – we performed a total of 5 timedemo benchmarks using a GPU-intensive pre-recorded demo. To ensure the most accurate results, the highest and lowest benchmark scores were then removed and an average calculated from the remaining three.
Oblivion from Bethseda is now an ‘old’ game by today’s standards, but is still one of the most visually taxing games out there. The benchmark was run in the wilderness with all settings set to the maximum possible. Bloom was used in preference to HDR. The test was run five times with the average FPS then being deduced.
Ubisoft has developed a new engine specifically for Far Cry 2, called Dunia, meaning “world”, “earth” or “living” in Parsi. The engine takes advantage of multi-core processors as well as multiple processors and supports DirectX 9 as well as DirectX 10. Running the Far Cry 2 benchmark tool the test was run 5 times with the highest and lowest scores being omitted and the average calculated from the remaining 3.
Results Analysis
Both Crysis and Far Cry 2 once again placed the two competing 4890’s close enough together to make a comparison very difficult while the older yet graphically intensive Oblivion once again showed the XFX to be top dog as far as GPU grunt was concerned. In contrast to the XFX card, as with the stress testing, the Sapphire HD4890 Vapor-X was near silent throughout the run of benchmarks which is worth a lot more than a couple of frames per second in my book as the eye cannot detect those FPS while the ear can plainly detect the noise the stock cooled 4890 throws out.
Let’s move on to the conclusion…
