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Sapphire HD 3870 X2 Review |
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Written by Димитър Динчев a.k.a. Veseliq
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Friday, 22 February 2008 |
Page 4 of 11
Page 4 - 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. And they were... almost enough.
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.
you need to upgrade your flash player
you need to upgrade your flash player
you need to upgrade your flash player
This is the game that was most problematic during testing. Ironically it was the first one to be tested too, so we came very close to anathematizing the HD 3870 X2. In DirectX 10 all over the screen we had artifacts and blinking textures, regardless of resolution, Antialiasing, level of detail and so on. As it turns out the problem is in the fact that the game has a total disregard for CrossFire. after we turned it off (disabling Catalyst A.I. from the driver), everything was fine, but the game depending very much on memory played a bad joke on HD 3870 X2 due to it's slower on, making it perform worse than it's little brother - HD 3870.
