Sapphire's Ultimate HD 3850 and Atomic HD 3870
Half-Life 2: Episode 2
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 Half Life 2: Episode 2 |
Thanks to the dedication of hardcore PC gamers and a huge mod-community, the original Half-Life became one of the most successful first person shooters of all time. And thanks to an updated game engine, gorgeous visual, and intelligent weapon and level design, Half Life 2 became just as popular. Episode 2 offers a number of visual enhancements including better looking transparent texture anti-aliasing. These tests were run at resolutions of 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 with 4X anti-aliasing and 16X anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently. Color correction and HDR rendering were also enabled in the game engine as well. We used a custom recorded timedemo file to benchmark all cards in this test. |
In our first of many games that we benchmarked, the Sapphire Radeons did not fare as well as could be expected. At the lower resolution, the faster Atomic HD 3870 still found itself from 9-11 frames behind the 8800 cards. This delta doubled once we raised the resolution to 1600x1200. The Atomic's higher speeds, however, consistently manage to keep it a few frames above the reference model. Even with the larger frame buffer on the Ultimate version of the HD3850, this card still finds itself far behind the rest of the pack due to its lower clock speeds.
