X-bit labs

First in DirectX 10.1: ATI Radeon HD 3850/3870 (page 23)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko, Anton Shilov

[ 01/25/2008 | 10:31 AM ]

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 ATI Radeon HD is still plagued with performance-related problems in this game but the minimum speed of the ATI Radeon HD 3870 is considerably higher than that of the Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB at 1280x1024. That’s not yet enough for comfortable play, but there are no catastrophic slowdowns, either.

Every way of software-based boost of ATI Radeon HD’s performance seems to have been exhausted in this game – for classic single-processor cards. But judging by the latest test of Crossfire technology, we expect the dual-processor version of ATI Radeon HD 3800 with two RV670 chips is going to achieve acceptable results in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

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 ATI Radeon HD 3870 is second after the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX which makes it the best choice for playing Unreal Tournament 3 considering the price factor. The less advanced Radeon HD 3850 is not as successful as the rest of the participating graphics cards, but only at a resolution of 1920x1200 that is hardly important for users who buy $159 graphics cards. Even so, the average frame rate of the junior Radeon HD 3800 is over 50fps, which is quite enough for comfortable play.