ATI Radeon HD 5870 Graphics Card

GTA IV - DirectX 9

The game is set in a redesigned rendition of Liberty City, a fictional city based heavily on modern day New York City. It follows Niko Bellic, a war veteran from an unspecified country in Eastern Europe, who comes to the United States in search of the American Dream, but quickly becomes entangled in a seedy underworld of gangs, crime, and corruption. Like other games in the series, GTA IV is composed of elements from driving games and third-person shooters, and features "open-world" gameplay that gives players more control over their playing experience. GTA IV is the first console game in the series to feature an online multiplayer mode, which contains fifteen game types.

Testing was performed at 2560x1600 with the maximum detail levels available on the GTX 295.

When testing Grand Theft Auto 4 we set the game to use the maximum settings available on the GTX 295 as the memory available to each GPU on that card affects the settings available. (896Mb per GPU on the 295 compared to 1 GB per GPU on all of the other products). With the playing field levelled we began our testing and found that this title performs very well on Nvidia’s GTX 295 which just edges out the 285 as best performer. ATI products were not quite as successful in this title with the results clearly showing that CrossFire doesn’t offer huge scaling potential in this game, something which demonstrates one of the advantages of the 5870. Until this point in the review ATI’s latest card has performed at a similar level to the 4870 CrossFire system however this only proves to be the case where multi-GPU profiles work well. When they don’t the 5870 is by far the better option.