X-bit labs

First in DirectX 10.1: ATI Radeon HD 3850/3870 (page 25)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko, Anton Shilov

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

Performance in RPG

Hellgate: London

The average frame rate of the ATI Radeon HD 3870 is as high as that of the more expensive GeForce 8800 GT 512MB, but its minimum speed is much lower, probably due to its having fewer TMUs. Well, neither of these cards can deliver acceptable performance in this game as it has too high system requirements. The less advanced cards are out of play as well, having an average frame rate of less than 25fps.

Gothic 3

The current version of the game doesn’t support FSAA, so we performed the test with anisotropic filtering only.

If you are choosing a graphics card to play Gothic 3, you should strike the Radeon HD 3850 out from you list due to its very low performance even at 1280x1024. The ATI Radeon HD 3870, on the contrary, looks good: it is rather cheap, noiseless, widely available, and offers good performance at resolutions up to 1600x1200. It won’t suit for large monitors, of course. If you’ve got a large monitor, you should search among GeForce 8800 GT cards or wait for dual-processors solutions from AMD.