X-bit labs

The Single-Decker Champ: ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 Graphics Card Review (page 12)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko, Anton Shilov

[ 02/18/2008 | 10:44 AM ]

Half-Life 2: Episode Two

The ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 is confidently ahead of the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB: by 10% at low resolutions and by 15-17% at high resolutions. The new card yields an average frame rate of near 60fps even at 1920x1200. That’s just what we should expect from a $449 product.

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.

ATI Radeon HD graphics cards have had problems in this test since their very release. The Radeon HD 3870 X2 puts an end to this as it is competitive against the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB. That’s not a victory since the ATI card is more expensive and is slower than the GeForce 8800 GTS/Ultra, yet it makes the resolution of 1920x1200 playable.

Note that the Radeon HD 3870 X2 is about two times as fast as the single Radeon HD 3870. This is explained by the higher frequencies of the former card’s GPUs.

Unreal Tournament 3

Forcing FSAA from the graphics card’s driver doesn’t produce any effect as yet. That’s why the game is tested with anisotropic filtering only.

The ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 is just as fast as Nvidia’s single-core cards GeForce 8800 GTX and GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB. They all reach the highest speed possible on our testbed at resolutions below 1920x1200. UT3 doesn’t suit well to reveal the scalability of a CrossFire system as it is perfectly optimized and runs very fast even on the single Radeon HD 3870.