Results

Let's start off with everyone's 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.  Screen resolution for our testing was set to 1024 x 768 to give us the best game play possible.  All settings were set to 'high' with the exception of FSAA which was kept off.  This choice of settings was made in an effort to put the cards under as much pressure as  possible while keeping our game play smooth.

Product	Min	Max	Avg
Visiontek HD4870	19	87	53
HD4850	30	85	53
HD3870x2	27	78	47

Our results here were superficially surprising but when you notice the first 20 seconds of play having a bit heavier action and being more demanding it sheds light on how the Visiontek HD4870 still shined.

Unreal Tournament 3 is our only DX9 based game.  Its graphics engine has a lot to challenge any VGA card however.  Using the Defiance map with 12 bots in Deathmatch we took a look at our card's performance.  All settings within the game were set to max with FSAA turned off.  Screen resolution is set to 1920 x 1440.

Product	Min	Max	Avg
Visiontek HD4870	38	136	75
HD4850	39	116	67
HD3870x2	38	140	67

Taking a clean foot hold on solid game play here with a 12% higher frame rate.  Let's move on to Assassin's Creed.

Assassin's Creed is a new game here in the Penthouse Labs.  It being DirectX 10 based helps us shift gears to the driving force behind new game designs.  All in game graphics settings were set at their maximum level with screen resolution set to 1920 x 1440.  As before full screen antialiasing was turned off.

Product	Min	Max	Avg
Visiontek HD4870	30	97	58
HD4850	31	76	49
HD3870x2	31	115	62

A decided performance increase over the HD4850 as you can well see.  I was very surprised to see the dual GPUs of the HD3870x2 do as well as they did.  We call it exactly as we see it.

The final standard bench is Futuremark's latest benchmarking suite, 3D Mark Vantage for Vista based machines.  While I'm not a huge fan of canned benches, a number of you have e-mailed asking that we include some of the Futuremark benchmarks.  You will notice a 24% increase in the GPU score over that of the HD4850 card we looked at a few weeks ago.

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Pg 1 - Introduction
Pg 2 - The Card
Pg 3 - Temperature, Sound, Test Bed
Pg 4 - Benchmarks
Pg 5 - Image Quality, Overclocking, Conclusion