ASUS EN9800GX2 review - first look at 9800 GX2

Written by Димитър Динчев a.k.a. Veseliq

Monday, 24 March 2008

 

Page 5 - Crysis

There is hardly a thing that had not been said about this game, but let's summarize. This is a long awaited Crytek release, sort of a heir of FarCry, which 3 years ago was dazzling with its graphics, making gamers with the top-notch video cards (GeForce 5900 / Radeon 9800 at that time) murmur about being unable to play at highest settings like they were used to. Their high-end systems just being unable to cope with the heavy engine.

In other words - Crysis was one of the MOST expected game of 2007. Ingame you assume the role of future Spec-ops soldier, equipped with the so called “Crysis Suit” - a suit giving you special skills and powers. Henceforth we'll be talking about graphics and scenery so real as if pulled out of a Hollywood blockbuster. The vast and incredibly detailed levels require a large amount of memory, so if you fancy enjoying some of the more special DX10 effects and higher resolution, high class video card, processor an lots of RAM are a must.

On the Internet you can easily find a tool named "Crysis Benchmark", but we had problems with it under Vista x64, under the 32-bit variant of the OS all was fine, so that little software made our lives easier. All tests were ran at least twice and the result is the divided sum between all attempts. But in past tests we used the benchmark_gpu - the integrated performance test of Crysis. To our surprise in this review we found out that AMD attempted to play a dirty trick with the Catalyst 8.2 drivers (and the ones that followed) affecting their new HD3870X2 (with these drivers the performance in this particular test was raised up to 60%, while in real game the difference was nonexistent). So instead of using the integrated timedemo, we used another, recorded during real game and we based the tests on it.

First if we look at the achievement of ASUS EN9800GX2, we can see that it shows good results. At 1680x1050 most probably the processor had reached its limit so most cards were running neck and neck, while at 1900x1200 apparently 8800 Ultra ran out of steam while the SLI solutions kept the streaming and amazing 32 frames per second. But results at 1900x1200 with Antialiasing on were illogical...

HD3870X2 is left with no result because of this - first, we tried to run the new custom timedemo with the card using the latest drivers - Catalyst 8.3, in result with Catalyst A.I. on, the test didn't run at all. With Catalyst A.I. off (and Crossfire off because of that), the test worked with a horrible framerate for approximately 3-4 minutes and then crashed. Quick restart and some anger management later another run at it lead to the same results. So I went on ahead to play just to see if the timedemo was to be blamed. It was impossible to play comfortable and luckily few minutes later the game crashed again with a error window. Another attempt was made with the drivers from the game's disk - a MSI modified Catalyst 8.2 ones, with them sadly everything was the same. Odd thing is that with both drivers benchmark_gpu runs just fine (with Catalyst A.I. turned off), we must also note that these phenomenons occurred only in DirectX 10 mode. In DirectX 9 the performance of the HD3870X2 in up to expectations, although it still leaves you with a bitter taste sensation of not being able to experience all the game effects after paying 750 leva (~375 Euro) for a new dual core card.