ATI Radeon HD 3850 CrossFire Video Card Review

BioShock

BioShock is a game published by 2K Boston/2K Australia, and designed by Ken Levine. The game is a PC and Xbox 360 title released on August 21, 2007 in North America. BioShock is a first-person shooter with role-playing game customization elements that was developed using the Unreal Engine 3.0 and is a DirectX 10 game title that is multithreaded.

Since 2K didn’t include a benchmark script or utility in BIOSHOCK, I used FRAPS version 2.9.2 to capture the frame rates for 240 seconds at scenes that I personally selected from the game. If you don’t know anything about Bioshock, let me set the scene for you: After your plane crashes into icy uncharted waters, you discover a rusted bathysphere and descend into Rapture, a city hidden beneath the sea. Constructed as an idealistic society for a hand picked group of scientists, artists and industrialists, the idealism is no more. Now the city is littered with corpses, wildly powerful guardians roam the corridors as little girls loot the dead, and genetically mutated citizens ambush you at every turn and you get to kill them. Let’s look at the benchmark results!

Benchmark Results: At 1024×768 with high quality settings set in the game, the Radeon HD 3850 scored roughly 20 frames per second higher than the GeForce 8600 and Radeon HD 2600XT. In CrossFire the cards performed well, but they didn’t scale as well as they did in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or Company of Heroes. The XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra XXX with it’s higher shader clock and additional memory took the lead with 119FPS!

Benchmark Results: At an in-game resolution of 1600×1200 and medium quality settings, the cards came alive in Crossfire and was able to place just a couple frames per second behind the GeForce 8800 Ultra. Both the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT and eVGA GeForce 8600 GT didn’t have enough muscle to be playable, but the new ATI Radeon HD 3850 was playable at 1600×1200 with medium quality settings. Not bad considering the Radeon HD 3850 and Radeon HD 2600 XT both carry the same original MSRP.