ATI HD4870 & HD4850 Crossfire Performance Review

Crysis DX9

Crysis is one of those games that comes along every now and then and totally humbles every graphics card on the market. While some people have pointed towards shoddy programming, it is undeniable that this game looks ridiculously good when played at higher settings.

For this test we recorded a custom timedemo on the Harbor level equaling about 20 minutes of game time through jungle, over water and in vehicles. All results were recorded with FRAPS over the course of the timedemo.


1280 X 1024



1600 X 1200



1920 X 1080


Crossfire Performance in Crysis DX9 has never been what we would call earth shattering and that tradition lives on here. We encounter a CPU bottleneck at lower resolutions and performance does increase but the HD4850s seem to struggle a bit when AA is turned on. That being said, adding a second card seems to net us a pretty significant increase in framerates no matter which way you look at it.