Half-Life 2: Episode Two

The effect from the increased frequency is quite obvious but not strong enough for the Radeon HD 3870 to catch up with the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB or GeForce 9600 GT. The gap is small at 1920x1200 and the speed is good enough for comfortable play, but the noise from the fan and the high temperature of the core won’t let you relax for real. It’s no fun playing when the graphics card is roaring like hell and can fail any moment because of the core voltage at 1.7V.

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 overclocking is no good for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. because this game is optimized for GeForce cards. The average speed gain of the overclocked Radeon is only 14-15%. ATI’s solutions can only do well in this game when they have more GPUs: the Radeon HD 3870 X2 is quite competitive against top-end single-chip cards from Nvidia.