GeForce GTX 275 Versus Radeon HD 4890 Video Card Battle

Tom Clancy: H.A.W.X.

Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. (High Altitude Warfare eXperimental squadron) is an aerial warfare video game developed by Ubisoft Romania and published by Ubisoft for Microsoft Windows. It was released in United States on March 6, 2009 and features Microsoft DirectX 10.1 game play.

I used this benchmark back in April 2009 in my original coverage of the GeForce 275 versus the Radeon HD 4890, but some new patches have come out that have greatly impacted performance. I also didn’t show the differences between DX9, DX10 and DX10.1 the first time around, but this time will.

For this game VSync was turned off, but Antialiasing was turned on and set to 8x for better image quality.

All of the DirectX 10 options were set to high including Ambient occlusion (SSAO) on both the NVIDIA and ATI graphics cards. The game was patched with update v1.2, which was the most current patch.

Benchmark Results: Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. is a very tough game to run in DirectX 10 as you can see from the chart above. When playing H.A.W.X. in DirectX 9 mode the GeForce GTX 275 has a 19% higher frame rate than the Radeon HD 4890, but with DirectX 10 settings it has a 24% lower frame rate. Only the ATI Radeon HD 4890 can render DirectX 10.1 game titles of the two cards and it does so at a very nice 56 FPS. The graphics in Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. are very stunning and if you like aerial combat games this is one title that is worth a look.