World in Conflict brings the Cold War to America's front door in a riot of action and simply breath-taking graphics. This real-time strategy game also makes use of a smattering of DirectX 10 effects to improve handling of lighting, smoke particles and the like, which makes the games' in-built timedemo ripe for usage in our graphics board testing suite. It's this demo that we use here, with the game broadly set to its 'Very High' settings.
Performance is top-notch on both boards at 1280x1024, while the faster GDDR4 memory of the Sapphire card grants it an average frame rate two frames per second higher than a reference part.
This gap actually shrinks a little with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering in place, although performance also drops quite dramatically with the aforementioned eye candy enabled.
Sapphire's offering comes a little closer to reaching a thirty frames per second average at 1680x1050, once again two FPS faster than a reference card.
Once again, the use of anti-aliasing on both of these boards pulls them down into unplayable territory from a performance perspective.
Race Driver: GRID
It may only sport a DirectX 9 graphics engine, but despite that Codemasters' Race Driver: GRID is still one of the best looking games of 2008, as well as proving to be a fantastic racing game for the PC. For this welcome addition to our benchmarking suite, we use FRAPS to record the framerate while navigating the game's Milan street circuit.
Sapphire's GDDR4-based Radeon HD 4670 jumps straight into over a 5% performance lead at 1280x1024 - Not quite enough to break sixty frames per second, but plenty to keep the game playable (as is the case on a reference board too).
The game remains broadly playable on both cards with anti-aliasing in use at this resolution, although the Sapphire board's lead shrinks to around 3.5% here.
That lead increases again as we crank up the resolution to 1680x1050, holding a 6.6% advantage over a reference board.
Even at our highest test settings GRID performs quite respectably, with the overall performance metrics continuing to sit in favour of Sapphire's GDDR4 part by around 5.8%.
