Sleeping Dogs Benchmarked with AMD EyeFinity at 5760x1080

Introduction

Our third outing in our EyeFinity benchmarks, this time we have Sleeping Dogs on the benchmarking table. Sleeping Dogs has been available for a while now, and features some great graphics and a beautiful built-in benchmark.

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Let's get into it shall we? For your information, I'm running:

- Intel Core i7 3770K @ 4.8GHz

- Corsair H100 Hydro Cooler

- Corsair Force Series GT 240GB SSD

- ASRock Z77 Extreme 9 motherboard

- AMD Catalyst 13.2 beta 4 drivers

I'd like to extend a big thank you to Sapphire, Corsair and ASRock for supplying the parts for this machine, I couldn't write this article or any future articles without this hardware!

It's a seriously nice machine, and really powers through what I do each day. I've got the CPU clocked up to remove any potential CPU-based bottlenecks, the RAM is at stock as it doesn't really help gaming performance all that much and everything else is at out-of-the-box settings.

Benchmark Results

What we've done with Sleeping Dogs is run it at the Extreme quality preset, with both 'Normal' and 'Extreme' AA settings. We've run this at 1080p with a single GPU stock, overclocked GPU stock at both Normal and Extreme AA settings. We ran this again with CrossFire enabled at both stock/overclocked and Normal/Extreme AA settings. We've run this same test yet again, at 5760x1080 with single/CF GPU, stock/overclocked and Normal/Extreme.

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It takes some time, but it gives us a better idea of what stresses the cards out and where potential usefulness with CrossFire comes into play.

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A single Sapphire Radeon HD 7970 at 1920x1080 can provide us with some great performance. We saw 125.4 FPS at stock, with an overclock giving a nice increase, pushing the frame rate up to 134.3 FPS at 'Normal' AA settings. Enabling 'Extreme' AA dropped the frame rate considerably, where at stock settings we saw 57.4 FPS and the OC on the single HD 7970 helped out by around 15% bumping the frame rate up to 65.1 FPS.

Enabling the second GPU for some CrossFire action provided some interesting results - at 1080p under Normal AA, we saw 126.7 FPS - a single frame faster than our single GPU test. Overclocking provided us with something weird - less average FPS than a single GPU!

Let's get into what we're all here for today - EyeFinity. First off, let's talk about the single GPU performance, where we respectively saw 57.4 and 65.1 FPS for the Normal and Extreme AA settings at 5760x1080. These are definitely playable frame rates, hitting that sweet 60 FPS average number for what we consider to be able to offer a solid gaming experience.

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AA always kills multi-monitor setups, and this is no different - enabling the Extreme AA setting saw a drastic drop in performance under our single Sapphire HD 7970 setup - dropping the frame rate to sub-20 FPS with 16.3 and 18.6 FPS for stock and overclocked settings, respectively.

Enabling the second GPU provided some huge increases in performance under EyeFinity, which we expected and were happy to see. Under the Normal AA settings at 5760x1080, we respectively saw 100.8 and 108.8 FPS for stock and overclocked on our HD 7970. This is around 80% extra performance over our single GPU results at 5760x1080 - some great results.

CrossFire with AA is always a great thing to see on EyeFinity, where we saw 32.7 and 37.7 FPS for stock and overclocked GPU, respectively. This is nearly double the single HD 7970 results, so there's some nice scaling with the Radeon HD 7970's in EyeFinity mode on Sleeping Dogs with Extreme AA enabled.

So there you have it, a bunch of numbers on EyeFinity with Sleeping Dogs. Our next adventure with Sapphire and their great HD 7970 video cards will be EyeFinity with Metro 2033 and BioShock Infinite - check back in a couple of days!