Radeon HD 4850 and 4870 CrossfireX

Gaming: Call of Duty 4

Activision recently released Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the next installment in the popular war game series. Moving away from the World War II setting, Modern Warfare instead centers around a conflict involving Russia and the Middle East. And hey, you even get to die ... and then continue the game in the past.

Call of Duty 4. Is there anyone who doesn't like the game ? For this benchmark we use disguise ourselves in the Ghillie suit, load up ACT II - All Ghillied up. Not just for the great gameplay, but also the intense and dense graphics utilized are breathtaking. Massive high-quality texturing, shaders and a serious amount of shadows, fog and debris are applied in this level to mask and hide as best as you can.

Image Quality setting:

• 4x Anti Aliasing
• 16x anisotropic filtering
• All settings maxed out

As you can see, it nearly isn't ... well let me rephrase that;  it just isn't funny for NVIDIA to see that, that's pain and agony on a silver platter. Stunning, absolute stunning performance for both Crossfire setups. I dunno what AMD recently did with their drivers, but the results are just staggering.

The level where we measure and the image quality settings used. For CF we enabled dual video cards (of course).

3DMark Vantage (DirectX 10)

3DMark Vantage focuses on the two areas most critical to gaming performance: the CPU and the GPU. With the emergence of multi-package and multi-core configurations on both the CPU and GPU side, the performance scale of these areas has widened, and the visual and game-play effects made possible by these configurations are accordingly wide-ranging. This makes covering the entire spectrum of 3D gaming a difficult task. 3DMark Vantage solves this problem in three ways:

1. Isolate GPU and CPU performance benchmarking into separate tests,
2. Cover several visual and game-play effects and techniques in four different tests, and
3. Introduce visual quality presets to scale the graphics test load up through the highest-end hardware.

To this end, 3DMark Vantage has two GPU tests, each with a different emphasis on various visual techniques, and two CPU tests, which cover the two most common CPU-side tasks: Physics Simulation and AI. It also has four visual quality presets (Entry, Performance, High, and Extreme) available in the Advanced and Professional versions, which increase the graphics load successively for even more visual quality. Each preset will produce a separate, official 3DMark Score, tagged with the preset in question.

The graphics tests will have four quality presets available: Entry, Performance, High and Extreme. Each preset specifies a certain setting for the rendering options listed in section 5.6. The graphics load increases significantly from the lowest to the highest preset. The Performance preset is targeted for mid-range hardware with 256 MB of graphics memory. The Entry preset is targeted for integrated and low-end hardware with 128 MB of graphics memory. The higher presets require 512MB of graphics memory, and are targeted for high-end and multi-GPU systems.

3DMark Vantage is obviously fresh from the shelves. With all the mayhem of PhysX results ending up in the scores and what not, we now officially ditch the "overall P" score. We measure performance of the graphics cards, and therefore will focus only at the GPU score; which is a 100% accurate number to observe & measure.

Again, one GTX 280 pushes out a GPU score of near 10.000, the 4850 Crossfire cards will match that for 399 USD. The 4870 cards in Crossfire really take off and two of them end up with a score of just over 13.000 points.

3DMark06

For the sake of it, i also threw in some 3DMark06 results, a much more CPU bound benchmark. Again clear cut great performance.