ATI Radeon HD3870 X2 1GB Review

1280 x 1024 Resolution Testing (DX10)


Crysis

This is the big one. Crysis has quickly become the 2000lb gorilla in the room with its amazingly realistic graphics that beggar any system on the block. For these tests the in-game benchmark was used and completed all 4 runs in 32-bit mode. And average was then taken from all 4 runs.




Call of Juarez

Other than being one of the first benchmarkable DX10 games, Call of Juarez also received luke-warm reviews but it provides some stunning visuals. To benchmark this game we used the in-game benchmark tool and ran it 4 times to give an average score.




Company of Heroes




World in Conflict




PT Boats: Knights of the Sea

Russian developer Akella has released a nifty little DX10 benchmark centered around their upcoming game PT Boats: Knights of the Sea. It is visually stunning and does a good job in displaying the potential of DX10.



Lost Planet: Extreme Condition




Results Analysis

The ATI HD3870 X2 looks very strong in these first DX10 tests where it stays ahead most of the time even though it gets its butt handed to it in Lost Planet. For some reason the card does very well in the Snow potion of the benchmark but the second things move over to the Cave area, everything falls apart. This game has never been one of ATI’s strong points and this proves that there is still some work yet to be done on the drivers.

Other than the odd performance in Lost Planet, there was some performance drops in Knights of the Sea which is a DX10 game developed on Nvidia hardware so the lower score is once again not surprising. The drivers also display a lack of polish in World in Conflict which ate this card alive in DX10 but as you will see in the 1600x1200 tests, the higher resolution yielded higher results. This is truly an indication of driver immaturity.

On the other hand, seeing this card stomping on the competition in Company of Heroes and Call of Juarez is great to see even with the lower scores in some of the other games. What socked me the most was the HD3870 X2’s performance in Crysis. Without AA enabled, its performance equaled that of the GTX but when AA was enabled it began pulling ahead.