ATI HD4870 & HD4850 Crossfire Performance Review

Unreal Tournament III

With absolutely stunning graphics, this popular online FPS provides great visuals to go hand-in-hand with palm-sweating gameplay.

For these tests we set up a 15 minute Bot Match on the Serenity level and let it play though. All of the results were recorded with the in-game benchmark tool.


Here we can see the real use of Crossfire: rendering games on a large screen. UTIII really doesn’t benefit much from a pair of cards at lower resolutions due to CPU bottlenecking but at higher resolutions the cards are able to kick some serious ass. Once again, it seems that Crossfire scales particularly well at these higher resolutions.

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.


Prey has always favoured Nvidia cards but the HD4870 Crossfire setup was able to pull pretty far ahead of a single GTX 280 while the other ATI dual card setups kept up quite well at high resolutions. What once again strikes us as amazing is the performance increase we saw going from a single card to dual ATI cards. It used to be that scaling wasn’t that great with dual GPU setups but it seem that ATI has done some amazing things with Crossfire.