Sapphire HD 4890 Atomic Edition Review

Testing:

Activision's Call of Duty: World at War goes right back to the bread and butter of the franchise - WWII FPS action. In this rendition, you start off in the South Pacific and move through a series of missions that flip back and forth between the Russian front and the island hopping advance toward the Imperial Japanese homeland. Included is a mission on Peliliu Island, arguably one of the more difficult and costly battles in the Pacific theater. The gameplay in single player mode is rather short, but the game makes up for this shortcoming in online gameplay. If you thought COD4 looked nice, this game is amazing with the graphics maxed out playing at a large resolution. This game just may be my reason to move to a 30 inch monitor. I will use Fraps to measure a section of gameplay in the Semper Fi map on Makin Island to compare performance of these video cards.

Settings:

• Game Settings: Maximum
• FPS measured via Fraps

As expected, the Atomic HD 4890 outperformed every card except the Asus GTX 285. Overclocking only helped overcome the GTX 285 at 1280x1024. The strong overclocking allowed for substantial performance increases at all four resolutions. This makes taking the time to tweak the card's clock speeds a worthwhile endeavor.