Radeon HD 6850 & 6870 CrossfireX review

Anno 1404 - Dawn of Discovery

I have been playing this excellent RTS, ever since the first Anno in the series was launched many years ago. Heck, I had a ton of fun with the original game series like Anno 1602 and 1701. If you're unfamiliar with the Anno series of games, they have all been (1404 is the 3rd sequel) colony-builders that take place in vast archipelagos filled with pirates, natives, treasures, and rival colonies. Typically, players start with a single ship packed with essential goods with which they colonize a single island, and then need to expand their realm.

With the same principles and philosophy yet more trading dynamics in-game, this series changed a little. Next to that the graphics engine had an overhaul allowing a DX10 code path, brushing up and speeding up things here and there while pertaining really nice image quality.

For our test with Anno 1404 we:

• enable everything 
• enable the highest possible image quality settings.
• DirectX 10 mode
• 4x Anti-Aliasing enabled.
• Use campaign build mode and have built three islands with extensive sizes cities.

Up-to 1600x1200 we actually see a wee it of CPU limitation, after that the CFX setups kick in, two cards again offer great scaling, especially the 6850 does well, the 6870 us fighting off that CPU limitation.

Here the sheer reality is that even one card performance is more than sufficient enough to play the game really well at even 1920x1200. But sure, two cards really offer great performance.