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 extremely overclocked version of Radeon HD 3870 is far ahead of itself working at the default frequencies. For example, the average performance growth amounts to 20% at 1600x1200 whereas the minimum speed grows up by 35%.

There is a smaller performance growth at 1920x1200 but it may indeed be helpful for the gamer in some situations. On the other hand, Nvidia’s solutions are even faster.

BioShock

BioShock doesn’t support FSAA when running in Windows Vista’s DirectX 10 environment. We benchmark graphics cards without FSAA in this game.

ATI’s cards feel at ease in BioShock without any overclocking. Running at a GPU frequency of 972MHz the Radeon HD 3870 nearly wins the test. It is only inferior to the dual-processor Radeon HD 3870 X2 and to the Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX. Note that the minimum speed of the Radeon HD 3870 X2 is considerably higher at resolutions above 1600x1200.

Extreme overclocking isn’t very beneficial from a practical standpoint. It only improves the minimum speed at 1920x1200 which was below 30fps before the overclocking.