Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
Modern Warfare 2 generally runs pretty well on most modern PC hardware, but it does have some parts where lots of activity and heavy use of shader effects can slow it down. We chose to test performance in one such area, where you're in a firefight inside of an office building. This close-quarters fight involves lots of flying debris, smoke, and a whole mess of enemy soldiers cooped up with your squad in close proximity.

To test, we played through this scene for 60 seconds while recording frame rates with FRAPS. This firefight is chaotic enough that there's really no hope of playing through it exactly the same way each time, although we did try the best we could. We conducted five playthroughs on each card and then reported the median of the average and minimum frame rate values from all five runs. The frame-by-frame results come from a single, representative test session.

We had all of MW2's image quality settings maxed out, with 4X antialiasing enabled, as well. We could only include a subset of the cards at this resolution, since the slower ones couldn't produce playable frame rates.

At last, the 5830 acquits itself reasonably well in one of our gaming tests. The GTX 260 is a tad quicker, but the two cards offer essentially equivalent performance, and the 5830 clearly outperforms the 5770 and 4870.