R680 Has Landed: ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2

Name: R680 Has Landed: ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 - Page 8
Brand: R680

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, January 28, 2008, 12:00 AM EDT

Performance Comparisons with Crysis

Details: www.ea.com/crysis

Crysis

If you're at all into enthusiast computing, the highly anticipated single player demo of the hot, new, upcoming FPS smash-hit Crysis, should require no introduction. Crytek's game engine visuals are easily the most impressive real-time 3D renderings we've seen on the computer screen to date. The engine employs some of the latest techniques in 3D rendering like Parallax Occlusion Mapping, Subsurface Scattering, Motion Blur and Depth-of-Field effects, as well as some of the most impressive use of Shader technology we've seen yet. In short, for those of you that want to skip the technical jib-jab, Crysis is HOT. We ran the SP demo with all of the game's visual options set to 'High' to put a significant load on the graphics cards being tested.

Crysis proved to be an interesting benchmark for the Radeon HD 3970 X2. Overall, it finished just a bit behind the dual-card Radeon HD 3870 CrossFire setup and a frame or two ahead of the GeForce 8800 GTX. Initially, however, Crysis didn't seem to scale well for us. And it wasn't until we got our hands on a new set of drivers that things fell into place for the X2. We point this out because the game has been out for many weeks, and it wasn't until a few days ago that the CrossFire began working properly during testing, which is a problem inherent to multi-GPU configurations - without the necessary driver support, that second GPU won't help performance at all.

Tags: ATI, Radeon, HD, X2, LAN, Radeon HD, ATI Radeon, 680, and

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com