ATI Radeon HD 3870 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 ATI Radeon HD 3870 video card beats out the Radeon HD 2900XT with no problems at all. At 60 frames per second it makes short work of Bioshock at this resolution and settings.

Benchmark Results: At an in-game resolution of 1600×1200 and medium quality settings, the Radeon HD 3870 still did a great job. With well over 40 frames a second it was almost able to compete with the GeForce 8800 GTS Overclocked edition from eVGA. In CrossFire, the card came to life and was able to overtake any single GPU by either AMD or NVIDIA.