X-bit labs

The Two Tigers: Asus EAH3870 TOP/G/HTDI/512M and EAH3850 TOP/G/HTDI/256M (page 11)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko

[ 01/29/2008 | 03:47 PM ]

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

The game doesn’t support FSAA when you enable the dynamic lighting model, but loses much of its visual appeal with the static model. This is the reason why we benchmarked the cards in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. using anisotropic filtering only.

The ASUS EAH3850 TOP and the corresponding reference card are out of the play right away as their performance is too low whereas the ASUS EAH3870 TOP allows playing at 1280x1024 even though being 12% slower than the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT 256MB. This is due to the problem that has always plagued the ATI Radeon HD architecture – insufficient optimizations of the Catalyst driver for the particular game engine.

Unreal Tournament 3

Forcing FSAA from the graphics card’s driver doesn’t produce any effect as yet. Perhaps the FSAA support will be added by means of a patch.

The engine of this game was meticulously optimized for the existing hardware and every graphics card, including the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT 256MB and the ATI Radeon HD 3850, feels at ease here at every display resolution. The pre-overclocked version of the latter card adds 16% to the frame rate to reach the desired 60fps mark. That’s the most significant practical effect from the overclocked frequencies of the ASUS cards we have spotted so far.