Crysis is the current game that pushes video cards to their limit. The latest from Crytek, Crysis offers some of the most incredible visuals you see today on the PC. For the test we ran through a flyby around the island that lasted about 4 minutes and recorded the average frames per second. Resolution was set at 1600x1200.
Call of Duty 4 is one of the best first person shooters released in 2008. The Call of Duty series makes its move to modern times with awesome graphics, intense battles, and great multiplayer action. The test was done at 1600x1200 resolution with a custom multiplayer demo that I recorded.
Compared to the GeForce 8800GTX, the Radeon HD 4870 exceeds it on every test and offers up a nice little performance boost. I’d like to have had a GeForce 9800 GTX on hand to see how it held up to that card but as of this writing we are still in the process of procuring a card. Compared to the Radeon HD 4850, the Radeon HD 4870 offers a marked improvement all around but I don’t know if it’s $100 worth. That said, future games might see the card’s ram show off its increased speed and bandwidth.
Quality of graphics can be improved by turning on anti-aliasing. The Radeon HD 4870 boasts great performance at both 4X and 8X AA. To test, I ran Call of Juarez at 4X while running Call of Duty at 4X and 8X AA at 1600x1200 resolution.
While there's a good jump in the loss of framerate going from no AA to 4X, the decrease in speed isn't as significant in Call of Duty 4 when going from 4X to 8X. Given the performance available, you can get very good framerates at high resolution with a good deal of AA turned on. I couoldn't get Crysis to run at 4X AA for the life of me as it kept crashing my machine but it did run 8X fine. I'm still working the problem out currently so hopefully in the near future I can put the 4X score up as well.
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