X-bit labs

A Lil’ Bit: A Little Faster ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 – MSI R3870X2-T2D1G OC Review (page 7)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko

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

Performance in First-Person 3D Shooters

Battlefield 2142

This game doesn’t support display resolutions of 16:10 format, so we use a resolution of 1920x1440 pixels (4:3 format) instead of 1920x1200 for it.

The somewhat dated engine of this game cannot load the tested card’s resources fully. As a result, the two cores clocked at higher frequencies are but slightly better than the reference card. The R3870X2-T2D1G OC copes with the job well at high resolutions, delivering about the same performance as the Gainward Bliss 8800 GTS 1024MB and GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB. The card is slower in terms of minimum speed but this doesn’t affect your playing comfort since the frame rate is never lower than 40fps.

BioShock

BioShock doesn’t support FSAA when running in Windows Vista’s DirectX 10 environment. That’s why we benchmarked the cards without FSAA.

The abundance of shaders has a positive effect on the performance of the MSI card. It certainly finds this test easy, being slightly slower than the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB at 1280x1024 and outperforming it at high resolutions. The card enjoys a 25% lead over the Bliss 8800 GTS 1024MB at 1920x1200.