ATI Radeon HD 3870 + 3850 CrossFire – Mixing Video Cards

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 1280×1024 and 1920×1200 with high quality settings set in the game the Radeon HD 3870 + Radeon HD 3850 CrossFire combination again does very well. At 1920×1200 all the CrossFire cards seem to be stuck at 57FPS, which might mean that something is limiting performance or there is a driver issue. At 1280×1024 the scaling between cards looks better.