Performance

Our test bed is based around an ASUS Maximus Formula X38 based mainboard.  The OS is Windows Vista Home Premium installed on a Western Digital SATA II HDD.  Our comparison card today are going to be a Visiontek Radeon HD4870.

Testing will be done with real world game play using frame rates recorded by the FRAPS program.  Results are graphed in three minute segments from three game titles, Crysis, Unreal Tournament 3 and Assassin's Creed.  Inside each of these games, we have saved spots where we can record game play from a set location making the course of action easier to duplicate between test products.  Screen resolution and other settings will be listed out before each performance graph.  We will also be throwing in Futuremark's 3DMark06 and 3DMark Vantage in the benchmark rodeo as well.  ATi's Catalyst 8.8 drivers were used for both cards in all tests.

Results

Starting the show off we have our favorite system buster, Crysis.  DirectX 10 really takes a VGA card to task with it's advanced graphics capabilities in Crysis.  As we have all seen before, Crysis can bring video card GPUs to their knees.  Now, I have heard that the benefits of most dual GPU cards don't really shine until you start reaching higher resolutions with eye candy maxed out to include FSAA.  To this end, we started off with what we found to be the most playable resolution and settings with the standard single GPU HD4870.  This being 1024x768 with FSAA turned off and all settings set to 'High'.

Now that was surprising indeed.  We repeated this bench several times to be sure we had it right.  Now if lower frame rates for twice the price is what we can expect, things don't look good here.  Let's jack up the resolution to see if the stories we have heard are true.  We turned all the graphics settings to Very High and from there sought the highest possible resolution while keeping game play enjoyable for the HD4870x2.  This turned out to be 1920x1440.

Obviously the dual GPUs of the HD4870x2 starts show their stuff at higher resolutions.  Let's see if adding in 8xFSAA keeps with the trend.  Keeping all the graphics settings to Very High we found the highest playable resolution with 8x FSAA to be 1600x1200.  Have a look.

The word on the street about eye candy and high resolutions is most definitively true.  The single GPU of the standard HD4870 simply couldn't take these settings.  At several spots as you can see from the graph, I thought the card had locked up.  Certainly not the case with the HIS HD4870x2. 

BACK                    NEXT

Pg. 1 - Introduction
Pg. 2 - The Card/Installation/Noise
Pg. 3 - Test Bed/Benchmarks
Pg. 4 - Benchmarks
Pg. 5 - Image Quality/Overclocking/Conclusion