X-bit labs

First in DirectX 10.1: ATI Radeon HD 3850/3870 (page 27)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko, Anton Shilov

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

Performance in Strategies

Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts

The new add-on to Company of Heroes is tested in DirectX 10 mode only since it provides the highest quality of the visuals.

The ATI Radeon HD 3870 has a higher minimum of speed than its predecessor and almost equals the result of the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB. You can try to play at 1280x1024 with FSAA turned on although there will be little playing comfort then. So, we don’t recommend to enable 4x FSAA in this game on such graphics cards as Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT and ATI Radeon HD 3870.

Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars

The game having a frame rate limiter, you should consider the minimum speed of the cards in the first place.

The ATI Radeon HD 3850 is the only graphics card here that cannot provide a minimum speed higher than 20fps at resolutions of 1600x1200 and higher. The more advanced Radeon HD 3870 is no worse than the monstrous GeForce 8800 GTX in this test.

World in Conflict

Although the ATI Radeon HD 3870 is rather far ahead of the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB, the overall performance level of AMD/ATI’s solutions is still very low. They don’t suit for playing World in Conflict, at least with the current version of the Catalyst driver.