Date:
Thursday , November 15, 2007
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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ATI Radeon HD 3800 Series

The ATI Radeon HD 3800 series graphics cards are here. We will explore performance in Crysis, Unreal Tournament 3, NFS: Pro Street, and TimeShift. We can now recommend two ATI graphics cards for your gaming needs.

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System Test Setup

For evaluation we are using an EVGA NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI motherboard. We are using an Intel Core 2 Duo X6800 2.93 GHz processor and 2GB of Corsair XMS2 Dominator CM2X1024-8888C4D at 4-4-4-12 1T. We are using the latest chipset drivers available and the latest BIOS at time of evaluation.

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Video Card Comparison Setup

For this comparison we are using stock, default clock speeds on both ATI video cards. For both ATI Radeon video cards we are using a driver provided by ATI which indicates itself as Catalyst 7.10. For both NVIDIA video cards we are using ForceWare build 169.05 provided by NVIDIA, which is based on the newly released 169.09 ForceWare drivers. ForceWare 169.05 provides the Crysis water reflection bug fix found in 169.09.

Please be aware we test our video cards a bit differently from what is the norm. We concentrate on examining the real-world gameplay that each video card provides. The Highest Playable section shows the best Image Quality delivered at a playable frame rate.

In our tables and graphs in this evaluation the abbreviation “TR MS” Indicates the use of NVIDIA’s Transparency Multisampling quality setting on GeForce 8 series video cards. CSAA indicates the use of NVIDIA’s CSAA AA mode.