R680 Has Landed: ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2
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 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.
