While our testing is designed to stress the card as much as possible, we all realize that games have quality settings for a reason. So, beyond seeing where the breaking point is for any individual card, I wanted to provide some insight into what image quality you can expect and get 60fps on a single widescreen. These settings are for the HD 5670. Settings for the HD 5550 would need to be lower. The 5450 would only be able to achieve 30fps in a few select games.
Note, it is simply not possible to hit 60fps in some games at this resolution. In those instances we shot for 30fps.
Batman: Arkham Asylum
Battle Forge
Turn everything down to Medium. Turn off SSAO. Turn off Cloud Shadows. Set 2xAA.
Turn everything down to Low, except Shadow Quality at Medium. Turn off SSAO. Turn off Cloud Shadows and Glow.
Dirt 2
Everything from Ultra to High, down to 2xAA. Post Process & Veh Reflections to Med
Everything to Low
Far Cry 2 - Far Cry hits 30fps at max settings. A variety of quality and AA settings will give the user 60fps.
GTA IV - You can hit 30fps with everything set to Medium. Performance never moves about that mark.
HAWX - Turn down DX10 items to Low. Leaves 2xAA and all "Advanced" items to High or On.
Heaven Demo - Even with significantly reduced settings, the benchmark will not reach 30fps. Only the DX9 variation comes close at low single-screen resolutions.
Half-Life 2
Widescreen - Both cards hit the 60fps goal in widescreen.
Eyefinity - The 5670 averages 30fps in Eyefinity across the two tests.
STALKER - It is not possible to hit 60fps with STALKER. I could hit 30fps with these settings: Medium, DX10, HDAO Low, Tessellation Off