ATI Radeon HD 3850 CrossFire Video Card Review

Crysis

Crysis is an upcoming science fiction first-person shooter computer game that is being developed by Crytek, and published by Electronic Arts. It will be released on November 15, 2007 in the United States. The game is based off the CryENGINE2 game engine, which is an extended version of CryENGINE, the game engine behind the hit game Far Cry a number of years ago.

On October 26th, 2007, Crytek recently released a single-player demo that has the entire first level, Contact, as well as the sand box editor included. We used FRAPS to benchmark this multi-threaded DirectX 10 beta that came just a few weeks ago.

Results: Crysis is obviously tough on video cards with high graphics settings, with only the XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra XXX edition having an average frame rate above 40. The Radeon HD 3850 easily outperformed the Radeon HD 2600 XT and GeForce 8800GT, but couldn’t compete with the more expensive cards. No Crossfire testing was included as some rendering issues were observed when Crossfire was enabled. Hopefully this will be fixed with the final build and it is normal to see things like this in beta games.

Results: At 1600×1200 with medium graphics quality set across the Radeon HD 3850 was again playable as it averaged above 30 frames per second. If you have an ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT or eVGA GeForce 8600 GT, it’s time to upgrade as at 1600×1200 these cards were unable to smoothly play the game.