Crysis Warhead and DiRT 2
Crysis Warhead has always been a harsh examination of high-end GPUs. The benchmarks show the Sapphire TOXIC to be a touch faster than the reference card, but what the graph doesn't portray is the perceptibly smoother games-playing experience.
Which
is echoed at 1,920x1,200, too.
The results are not a mistake. A 2GB frame-buffer enables the Radeon HD 5870 GPU to breathe when really taxed. Indeed, it's faster than a Radeon HD 5970 - a card that has to share its frame-buffer between the GPUs.
A near-30 per cent performance increase over a generic HD 5870 is down to more than just clock-speed, clearly.
DiRT 2
But DiRT 2 is agnostic of frame-buffer; a 1GB HD 5870 does just fine. What's more, there aren't any meaningful deviations between minimum frame-rates, either.
