Last is our old friend STALKER.  STALKER is a very resource intensive game with a variety of graphics settings within the game.  The most intensive of these is the 'Full Dynamic Lighting'.  This effectively turns on all the eye candy, grass and sun shadows as well as max detail for all areas.

Here is where the Radeon HD3870x2 really shined.  Absolutely blowing away the 8800 GT.  What a contrast to what we saw with NFS: Pro Street.  So much the contrast to the HD3870x2 being trumped even by the HD3850 in NFS: Pro Street that I'm having visions of days past when drivers were optimized for specific games.  I'd like to think ATi and NVidia don't pull that stuff anymore but the last two benchmarks do cast doubt into the air.

Image Quality

Below is a non-compressed screen shot from NFS: Pro Street.  The quality is excellent.  Resolution was set to 1600 with eye candy set to max to include max FSAA.  Rather than my tell you, see for yourself below.  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder you know.

Overclocking and General Stability

Overclocking the HD3870x2 was a complete bust.  Usually, I go with the Auto-Tune feature to get me in the card's ball park before I take over and start trial and error runs.  With the new Radeon, every time I fired up the Auto-Tune automatic overclock feature the card would lock up in less than a minute.  I likewise couldn't find any setting worth mention that would allow the card to run overclocked for more than a short while. 

This actually drove me into some stability issues that reared their ugly heads.  In running some batched demos to stress the card over time as well as attempting extended Crysis sessions, I discovered that the Radeon HD3870x2 would slowly heat up and couldn't take more than two hours max without locking up.  What made this especially sad was that we did our testing in a system laid out in an open rack. 

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Pg 1 - Introduction
Pg 2 - The Card
Pg 3 - Operation / Temperature / Test Bed
Pg 4 - Crysis / NFS: Pro Street
Pg 5 - STALKER / Image Quality / Overclocking
Pg 6 - Conclusion