1280 x 1024 Resolution Testing (DX9)


3DMark06 Professional





Company of Heroes

Company of Heroes from Canadian developer Relic has been widely held as one of the greatest RTS games of all time while also being one of the most stressful games on the graphics card. There are very few instances in this game that will not make your graphics card beg for mercy and as such it makes a great benchmarking tool. Instead of using a typical mission (which seems to have given odd results more often than not when used with FRAPS) we are now using the in-game benchmarking tool which seems to give MUCH more consistent results.



Half Life 2: Episode 2

Half Life 2: Episode 2 is the newest installment in Valve’s long running Half Life series and this is without a doubt the best looking game in the series. For this benchmark a typical 10 minute exterior gameplay sequence was prerecorded and then played back using the in-game timedemo feature. The results were recorded with FRAPS.



Lost Planet: Extreme Condition

This game was one of the first to jump into the DX10 pool. It provides some pretty good visuals while being very fun to play. In this test we ran through the retail version’s in-game benchmark 4 times and averaged out the scores we received in each area.



World in Conflict

This is one stunning game. World in Conflict has provided me with some of my most memorable gaming experiences since the first Homeworld game was released and it has not stopped wowing me. This is a brand new benchmark for us and with all of the bangs and whistles turned on; this is a great benchmark for any graphics card out there.



Prey

Even though Prey may be a bit older game compared against many of the other ones we are testing, it still provides a workout of even the best graphics cards on the market. This time we have enabled its Graphics Boost feature (Gboost in the charts) and run through a custom timedemo.



Results Analysis

You will notice that I have eliminated the tests without AA enabled since I think their results would be pretty redundant for a card this powerful.

I was actually pretty amazed by the performance achieved by the HD3870 X2; it bested the 8800GTX the majority of the time and the only area where it fell slightly behind was in Lost Planet which is designed to use Nvidia hardware. What really shocked me was the stunning performance we saw in the Company of Heroes test since this game has never been an ATI strong point. The 3DMark06 score was just as incredible even though we were expecting this from a dual chip card. So, things are looking good in these initial tests for ATI's new flagship, especially when you look at the scaling between it and a single HD3870 512MB card.