Real-World Gaming Benches

Far Cry 2:

The first gaming test we are going to use is Far Cry 2.  This test was run with the "Ultra" preset, at all common resolutions and AA settings.  The HD4870 Toxic guickly puts some distance on the HD3870 X2 as quality settings go up.  Both cards take a performance hit as expected at 8x anti-aliasing but surprisingly the Toxic's overall average remains pretty stable at higher resolutions.  More telling is the fact that the 3870 X2's average remains consistantly below the low scores for the toxic as well.   Below is the raw data used to compile the chart.

The data:

Crysis: Warhead

To get an idea of just how well this performance would carry into one of the most demanding games out on the market today, we turned to the recently released Crysis: Warhead.  Using the HOC benchmarking tool, I captured the following numbers.  (Demo: Airfield, Quality: Very High, Direct X 10 mode with 0xAA)

	3870X2			4870 Toxic
	Min	Max	Avg	Toxic Min	Max	Avg
800 x 600	0	40	20	14	42	27
1024 x 768	9	35	22	14	36	27
1280 x 1024	9	29	20	13	31	24
1600 x 1200	10	23	17	14	24	20
1920 x 1200 WS	6	21	15	13	22	18

While not as brutal as the original Crysis, the newly released Crysis: Warhead still punishes even the most advanced video cards.  As expected the HD4870 Toxic dominates the benches.  The Toxic does a nice job of keeping the average frame rates up in all of the resolutions which makes for a more dependable gaming experience even if you still have to turn some of the goodies down from the max.

World in Conflict:

Next up is Massive's World in Conflict.  WiC has a fantastic built in benchmark that taxes video cards with an amazing amount of simultaneous actions. WiC is one of my favorite games and besides any Benchmark that ends in a Nuke can't be all bad right?  (Tested at 1920x1280 with detail set to Very High)

World in Conflict shows a commanding lead for the HD4870. Once again the difference is most visible in the minimum frame rates.  I trust no one out there wants to try and play a game at 4 FPS.

Unreal Tournament 3:

While UT3 is getting a bit dated, it is still a great measure of performance that can be used across a wide variety of different hardware builds. (Tested with DX10 on 1920x1200 in window mode)

The difference in scores for Unreal Tournament is the largest so far proving that the latest cards have mastered these classics.  Our HD4870 Toxic can take UT3 without even raising a sweat.

 Company of Heroes:

For our final gaming benchmark we will be using Company of Heroes.  Featuring a mix of complex RTS play and cinematic elements CoH taxes video card processing power on several levels.  (Tested with DX10 at 1920x1200 with all settings set to High)

As with all previous tests our Sapphire HD 4870 Toxix provides us with a dominant performance.  It is hard to believe the 4870 cards are selling for much less than the 3870 X2 for top models like our Visiontek HD3870 X2. 

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