HD 4000 Review: Playing Mass Effect, Age of Conan and Assassin's Creed

When the Geforce GTX 280 was launched, we tested how it deals with Assassin's Creed, Age of Conan and Mass Effect. Now it is time to do the same for the Radeon HD 4800 series.

Often benchmark results are reduced to the maximal or average frames. The minimal frames, which give a hint of the worst possible performance situation, are left out. For example an average frame rate of 40 can be reached by equal amounts of 60 and 20 fps. Thus the game wouldn't be fully playable half of the time.



Because of this we get rid of the average fps and analyze the performance with two practical line charts that show the frame rate of the games at an interval of one second. This makes it easy to detect lags and freezes, which would be seen with average fps results.

Test system
CPU: Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 @ 3.000 MHz (333x9)
Board: Nforce 680i SLI
RAM: 4x 1.024 MiByte DDR2-800 (5-5-5-23)
OS: Windows Vista 64 Bit with SP1
Driver:
• Forceware 177.34 (HQ)
• Catalyst 8.5 (AI def.), 8.6 for HD 48x0

VGA:
• Geforce GTX 280, 1.024 MiB GDDR3, 602/1.296/1.107 MHz
• Geforce GTX 260, 896 MiB GDDR3, 576/1.242/999 MHz
• Geforce 9800 GX2, 2 x 512 MiB GDDR3, 600/1.512/1.000 MHz
• Geforce 8800 Ultra, 768 MiB GDDR3, 612/1.512/1.080 MHz
• Geforce 9800 GTX, 512 MiB GDDR3, 675/1.674/1.100 MHz

• HD 4850, 512 MiB GDDR3, 625/993 MHz
• HD 4870, 512 MiB GDDR5, 750/900 MHz
• HD 3870 X2, 2 x 512 MiB GDDR3, 825/901 MHz
• HD 3870, 512 MiB GDDR4, 776/1.125 MHz

Testing procedure
Age of Conan, Assassin's Creed and Mass Effect are benched with Fraps. This program records the fps every single second during a 30 seconds sequence. To verify the results we run each benchmark twice. Because it is one of the most frequently used resolutions, we chose 1,680x1,050 pixels and activated 4x Anti Aliasing and 16:1 Anisotropic Filtering.

For the benefit of clearness, we chose to replace the two dual GPU cards Geforce 9800 GX2 and the Radeon 3870 X2 with the new HD 4000 cards and the GTX 260 in the line chart. The playability chart of course shows all the recorded results.