Premium/High-End Category

The updated Aurora engine needs quite a lot of resources running this visually advanced game. As you can see, none of the solutions from this category can yield a bottom speed of 25fps at 2560x1600. And the clumsy and expensive 3-way Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire subsystem is the only solution to cope with that job at 1920x1200.

The GeForce GTX 280 SLI subsystem is not much better than the corresponding single card, at least at resolutions above 1280x1024. The Radeon HD 4870 X2 is the fastest card and the best buy in this category among products occupying one PCI Express x16 slot.

Performance-Mainstream Category

Strangely enough, it is better with single graphics cards: every single-chip model from the Radeon HD 4800 series can maintain a comfortable frame rate at resolutions up to 1680x1050/1600x1200 pixels. As it happens occasionally, the multi-GPU subsystems must be unable to operate correctly due to some specifics of the game engine.

Nvidia’s cards are not brilliant in this test, yet the GeForce GTX 260 is more or less good. The GeForce 9800 GTX+, on the contrary, indicates that you can’t take water from the same vessel infinitely. The time of the G80/G92 architecture has run out and even overclocking can’t make it competitive to the new-generation architecture developed by ATI.

Mainstream Category

The ATI Radeon HD 4830 stands out among the inexpensive products. It may look humble in comparison with the Radeon HD 4850 and 4870 but is head above Nvidia’s G92/94-based solutions as well as the previous generation of Radeon HD. As a result, this mainstream card allows playing normally at a resolution of 1680x1050 with maximum level of detail and 4x MSAA whereas the other representatives of the Mainstream category can’t do that.

The Radeon HD 3870 provides a comfortable speed at 1280x1024 whereas the GeForce 9800 GT, let alone the GeForce 9600 GT, are too slow even then.