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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Crysis

(DirectX 10)

We are using the full version of Crysis. Crysis is a first person shooter that is set in 2019. What makes Crysis unique is the amazing destructible environment and the on the fly customizability of your character and your weapons. Then there is always the graphics quality that will bring even the top end video cards to their knees. We will be playing Crysis in the default APIs for our system, which launches automatically in DX10 mode with the 64-bit executable. We have applied the latest hotfix patch version 1.2.1 for Crysis.

As you progress through Crysis the game becomes more graphically demanding; first the scenic vistas, then the weather effects, and finally the final boss all lead your optimized playable settings of the first few levels to become unplayable. Our run-through in the graphs below involves 10 minutes of gameplay in “Assault_Crysis” the Harbor map. This map includes the transition from night to day, tons of explosions, particles, physics, AI interaction and water.

Note that in the graphs, we have lowered our redline to 25 FPS for Crysis. This game is demanding, and low framerates are impossible to avoid, gameplay is also different in this game to where 25 FPS and up feels very playable, very likely due to the efficient use of motion blur. Note that the down-spikes to 0 FPS in the graphs are due to the saved game points.

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In Crysis, the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 provides an enjoyable gameplay experience at 1920x1200. We were able to set all in-game options to “High” and turn AF up to 16X. We tried to enable 2X AA at these settings, but performance was too choppy to be playable. If you wish to play with AA turned on in Crysis, you will find yourself either lowering the resolution, or lowering in-game quality settings. Our gaming experience shows that the image quality trade off for AA in Crysis is not worth it. It is best to keep the in-game settings and resolution as high as possible to achieve the best gameplay experience.

The ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 matched the gameplay experience of the BFGTech GeForce GTX 280 with the exact same playable settings. However, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 SLI surpassed both video cards, allowing us to use 4X AA at 1920x1200. With 4X AA enabled at 1920x1200 with all “High” settings the game was much more enjoyable in terms of image quality with GeForce GTX 260 SLI.

The single Radeon HD 4870 was not playable with all settings at “High.” We had to lower Objects, Shadows, Volumetric, Game, Particles and Post Processing effects. Therefore the Radeon HD 4870 X2 allows us to use higher in-game settings compared to the Radeon HD 4870 in Crysis.