ATI Radeon HD 3850 CrossFire Video Card Review

World in Conflict

World in Conflict (also known as WiC or WIC) is a real-time tactical video game developed by Massive Entertainment and published by Sierra Entertainment for Windows and the Xbox 360. The game was released in North America on 18 September 2007 and was included in our testing as it is a recent DirectX 10 game title. It also has a threaded engine for multi-core processor support, which is ideal for this testing. The plot in World in Conflict is to defend their country, their hometown, and their families in the face of Soviet-led World War III, delivering an epic struggle of courage and retribution. You are a field commander leading the era’s most powerful military machines in the heroic effort to turn back the invasionone city and suburb at a time. Let’s get on to the benchmarking! WIC was tested using the most recent patch available, which is patch number 002.

Results: When the game graphics are set to medium quality the game runs in DirectX 9 mode, so we ran testing at 1600×1200 with these settings. The Radeon HD 3850 did well, but even in CrossFire it wasn’t good enough to catch up to any of the GeForce 8800 series graphics cards. Let’s take a look at what happens when the game is set to high graphics quality under DirectX 10.

Results: Now that DirectX 10 has been enabled on high quality settings, a big decrease in frames per second is observed. The $170 (MSRP) ATI Radeon HD 3850 scores just one frame per second slower than $399 (MSRP) ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT. This card hangs right with cards that once cost twice its price, although it wasn’t able to catch up to any of the GeForce 8800 series cards with or without Crossfire.