Date:
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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AMD ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 is here in final form, sporting a new BIOS and brand new drivers, this video card is poised to take the performance crown. We will evaluate real-world gameplay experiences in Crysis, Age of Conan, Call of Duty 4 and Grid concentrating on high-resolution gaming with AA and providing A2A tests.

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System Test Setup

We will be using an Intel quad core CPU platform with the EVGA 790i Ultra SLI motherboard or an ASUS P5E3-Premium CrossFire Motherboard, an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 (Overclocked to 3.66GHz), and 4GB of Corsair CM3X1024-1800CD Dominator DDR3 to make sure the system will not be bottlenecking the GPUs.

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Comparison Setup

We are overclocking our CPU from 3GHz to 3.66GHz (11x333) so that we can reduce any CPU limitations.

For the BFGTech GeForce GTX 280 OC and GeForce GTX 260 SLI we are using ForceWare 177.41.

For the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 and 4870 we are testing with the latest drivers at this time, which are Catalyst 8.8 WHQL.

We also have Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista 64-bit installed.

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. To get a better understanding of what we do, please read this page. Do understand that our image quality settings are derived from playing through the entire game, not just the framerate section we graph for you in order to show you a performance comparison.