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Exclusive - Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 TOXIC 2,048MB graphics card review

by Tarinder Sandhu on 24 March 2010, 11:31

Tags: Sapphire

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qawrh

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Crysis Warhead and DiRT 2

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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.
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Which is echoed at 1,920x1,200, too.
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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

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DX11
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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.