Crysis

This game is tested at the High level of detail, excepting the Shaders option which is set at Very High. This way we try to achieve a compromise between image quality and speed.

The overclocking increases the performance of the Radeon HD 3870 by about 20% but the game is still far from playable even at the relaxed graphics quality settings. The overclocked Radeon almost beats the GeForce 9600 GT and gets close to the GeForce 8800 GT even though the absolute performance growth is very low.

It looks like you have to wait for the next generation of graphics cards from ATI and Nvidia to enjoy Crysis fully. We have some apprehensions that the game will run fast enough even then, though.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

The frame rate is fixed at 30fps in this game as this is the rate at which the physical model is being updated at the server. Thus, this 30fps speed is the required minimum for playing the game.

Working at its limit, the Radeon HD 3870 takes third place at 1280x1024 and second at the higher resolutions where it is only slower than the GeForce 9800 GTX.

The speed is far above the required limit but it is really risky to use your graphics card in such a harsh operating mode. We can see that the overclocked Radeon HD 3870 is not far slower than the more expensive competing solutions, though.