X-bit labs

A Lil’ Bit: A Little Faster ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 – MSI R3870X2-T2D1G OC Review (page 10)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko

[ 04/30/2008 | 11:04 PM ]

Half-Life 2: Episode Two

The MSI card is in the lead, outperforming the Gainward Bliss 8800 GTS 1024MB by 10% at low resolutions and by 15-17% at high resolutions. However, the factory overclocking is not as beneficial as you might expect. The MSI delivers an average frame rate of nearly 60fps even at 1920x1200. That’s quite a good result for a premium-class 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.

Having two GPUs, the MSI card feels quite at ease even in the unfavorable S.T.A.L.K.E.R. environment. Competing with the Gainward Bliss 8800 GTS 1024MB, the card leaves its single-chip mate far behind and delivers a considerable performance gain thanks to the pre-overclocked GPUs. The gameplay is quite comfortable even at 1920x1200.