Civilization V
A brand-new addition to the suite, the fifth installment of one of the world's most popular games can be surprisingly hard on high-end hardware.
We're administering the cards some hurt by running the built-in LateGameView benchmark at high-quality settings. The worst-case scenario benchmark stresses all parts of the system and is indicative of the game being played past 300 turns.
The two GeForce cards' performance doesn't degrade as we dial-up the image settings, suggesting that the bottleneck here is a £750 Intel Core i7 980X EE chip (some bottleneck, huh?). Indeed, performance increases at 2,560x1,600.
Radeon HD 5870's performance drops at 2,560x1,600, intimating GPU limitations, while the Radeon HD 5970's results are just plain weird - it seems as if CrossFire isn't working. We report what we see, not what we expect to see, but are looking into why the performance isn't where it should be. Stay tuned.
| Comparison at 25x16 | GTX 480 | HD 5870 | HD 5970 |
| Faster/slower (per cent) | +1.6 | +52.7 | +71.4 |