ATI Radeon HD3870 X2 1GB Review

Early Driver Performance Issues & Solutions

A graphics card like this is either laughed at or accepted based on how well its drivers support modern games and benchmarks. Writing and perfecting drivers for what is essentially a Crossfire setup is a long and arduous task and just the thought of the amount of work involved makes my head spin. Yet, the ATI driver team has been working furiously and we received revised drivers a few days before this review was going to be published. So, all the benchmarks you have seen are based around these new drivers.

That being said, when we first received the HD3870 X2, there were some driver issues which you will likely encounter when you receive the card. Below is a window into some of the conflicts we experienced and how you can overcome them while waiting for the next driver revision.

Once again, please note that these issues were only experienced with EARLY drivers and are only included here to give you some idea of how to bypass them


World in Conflict (DX9)


Problem: While the DX10 benchmarks ran without much of a hitch things fell apart when the game booted in DX9 mode. As you can see above, I experienced a fair amount of image corruption with the settings at default to the point where the in-game menus were completely illegible.


Solution: Turning off the Catalyst AI fixed this problem but this resulted in extremely low frame rates. Nonetheless, the game was playable and the menus were completely without artifacts.


Call of Juarez (DX10)

Problem: The problems with this game proved to be a real head-scratcher for me since Call of Juarez has been used by ATI in the past to show off their cards. However, with the HD3870X2 the in-game DX10 benchmark refused to boot when AA was turned on. The screen turned black and there was no way to recover short of manually resetting the system.

Solution: Once again, nothing I did fixed this problem other than disabling Catalyst AI but since this disables optimizations, the performance suffers greatly.

Thankfully, through all of the tests I put the HD3870X2 through these were the only two games where it experienced any glaring issues with older drivers. Now onto the shining achievement of the ATI team…


A New Hope…..

ATI pulled a rabbit out of their collective hats with only 3 days to go before the NDA was lifted with a new driver release. The performance difference was so extreme I couldn’t ignore it and I had to redo EVERY test over again and rewrite a significant part of this review. Not only were the issues I had mentioned above completely solved but the performance difference in games like Crysis, World in Conflict and Call of Juarez was like night and day. It is like the entire driver team suddenly sat up, shouted “Eureka!!” and boosted performance by leaps and bounds. They breathed new life into the HD3870 X2 making it a great card where an ok card once existed.

Stay tuned for these drivers to be released to the general public.