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3DMark Vantage, Far Cry 2
3DMark Feature Tests:
 
 
 
The extra 160 stream processors and 256-bit memory bus of the 4890 come to the fore, giving it a decisive edge over the 4770. The 4670 performs as expected for the price; well short of its more expensive brethren.
 
These two graphs make it abundantly clear that the 4770 and 4890 are in a different league to the 4670. This is most pronounced in the Feature Test 3, where the 4670 suffered from having only half of the Stream Processing Units of the 4770, let alone the 4890.
Futuremark, creators of 3DMark, have this to say about this test: "This test represents a very complex, heavy pixel shader, containing massive amounts of texture reads (ray-tracing) and dynamic flow-control (ray-tracing, looping over multiple lights), as well as traditional lighting calculations (Strauss). All the geometry on screen is rendered on just two triangles, and simulated entirely in the pixel shader. "
You don't have to be a genius to figure out that if one card has twice the amount of Stream Processing Units (which can be generally referred to as shader units) - or more than twice the amount in the case of the 4890 – then it should perform noticeably better.
The overclocking breakdown provides a few interesting points, most notably that the 4770's greater headroom for overclocking (bearing in mind the overclocking "disclaimer" mentioned earlier) translates into the largest gains to be seen. 12% to 14% across the range of tests is a handy gain by anyone's standards.
Far Cry 2:
A regular in the OCAU "Melbourne test lab" (wooden bench with computer bits strewn around haphazardly), Far Cry 2 is based on Ubisoft's "Dunia" engine. As a side note, if you're interested in the history of game engines, check out this page that was linked to on the OCAU news page not long ago.
 
The 4670 proves playable at 1280x1024, which is pretty impressive considering the level of detail in this game and the fact that the benchmark is pretty torturous in parts. Raising the resolution or enabling anti-aliasing quickly shatters any illusions of dreamy performance, whilst at the same time the 4770 and 4890 come into their element.
Interestingly enough, the 4770 actually ekes out a minor win in a few categories here, although the following line graphs illustrate that the 4890 is still easily averaging higher frame rates.
  
Left: 4670 - Centre: 4770 - Right: 4890
In case you're wondering, that prominent dip at the end of every graph a section of the "Ranch Medium" benchmark where flames envelop a small gathering of baddies who strut around doing their bad-guy thing.
 
Pretty close competition here between the 4770 and 4890, which is most likely explained by a CPU bottleneck. This is further supported by the fact that the minimum frame-rate did not budge at all when the GPU's were overclocked, suggesting that the rest of the system couldn't feed enough data to the GPU.
The 4770 again puts its hand up for acknowledgement, particularly at the most taxing setting of 1600x1200 4xAA, where you can see from the previous graphs that it's lifted itself up to a borderline playable minimum of 20fps. It actually averaged a shade over 50fps at this setting, nipping at the heels of the 4890's 60fps average.
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