AMD ATI Radeon HD 4770 512MB GDDR5 review

Page 4 - Performance: Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. (DirectX 10 vs DirectX 10.1)

The story in Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. ("High Altitude Warfare eXperimental squadron") takes place during the events in Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter (which are utterly vague the author of this article). Basically you play in a future in which private military organizations have replaced the government controlled military forces of most of the worlds countries. You get to be a pilot, former elite military flyboy, hired by one of these organizations, to fly whatever he is given, whenever he is needed to. Later the character you're supposed to associate with will have (like it or not) to return to its former employer - US Air Force. If for nothing else - to at leas along with its old buddies prevent a massive terrorist attack against the US of A, one initiated by the very same private enterprise that hired his ass from the US Air force in the first place...

What much more interesting for us though is that the game implements in its engine a bunch of new technologies and effects, effectively using not only DirectX 10, but DirectX 10.1 too. It is assumed that under DirectX 10.1 the game will not only dash out more eye candy but will also perform faster due to improvements offered by the DirectX 10.1 architecture. This is a small advantage on behalf of AMD HD 4770 against 8800GT / 9800GT, but then again only proper testing will prove or disprove that. For starters we have for you few DirectX 10 vs DirectX 10.1 screenshots from the in-game visualization benchmark

It might not be all to evident from the screenshots, but under DirectX 10.1 mode the surface and air explosions look a bit more realistic and the light looks a tad better too. All hardly noticeable things, yet ones that do add to the overall game experience enjoyment, with no loss in performance. Now lets see about the performance differences though.

The results are clearly intriguing. HD 4770 totally outperforms HD 4830 and at 1280x1024 is just as good as the more expensive HD 4850 model. At 1680x1050, where the amount of memory matters, 4770 is even ahead of all other cards. And yes, on one hand in DirectX 10.1 mode we do get more frames per second, while on the other in that particular game GeForce 9800 GT is not performing well at all, doing worse than all and any AMD cards.