Not everyone have a bigass LCD monitor for running a game on a very high resolution. May I suggest to add a moderate resolution (say 1680 x 1050 or 1440x900) before the apples-2-apples section and try to maximize the image quality on this resolution by in-game settings and AA settings.
And...
Why there are many changes on how playable the game was on this article compared to the article about AMD Radeon HD 4800 Series on hardocp :
1. Higher shadow quality for GeForce GTX 260 (Crysis)
2. Lower view distance for Radeon 4870 (Age of Conan)
3. Higher FPS with higher resolution for...