6 - Multi GPU Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway (1)

Please setup your monitor

Before playing games, setting up your monitor's contrast & brightness levels is a very important thing to do. I realized recently that a lot of you guys have setup your monitors improperly. How do we know this? Because we receive a couple of emails every now and then telling us that a reader can't distinguish between the benchmark charts (colors) in our reviews. We realized, if that happens, your monitor is not properly setup.

This simple test pattern is evenly spaced from 0 to 255 brightness levels, with no profile embedded. If your monitor is correctly set up, you should be able to distinguish each step, and each step should be roughly visually distinct from its neighbors by the same amount. As well, the dark-end step differences should be about the same as the light-end step differences. Finally, the first step should be completely black.

What are you looking at in this article?

Important -- What we'll do with the performance tests is look at several graphics card configurations in various Multi-GPU setups.

Per game title we start with a direct comparison between the new hot and spicy X58 / Core i7 965 based platform and our, up to this point, considered high-end primary graphics card test system that we have been using for the past year or so based on a 3 GHz Core 2 Duo processor. A system very commonly used by you guys.

We start off in the Netherlands, Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway.

Brothers in Arms Hell's Highway

Hell's Highway, another WWII shooter some might say. But in reality the setting of war is really just a vehicle for Gearbox to tell the storyline of a Band of Brothers which is led by you, Sergeant Matt Baker, as they deal with the madness and consequences of war. The game tells the story of Operation Market Garden in the country yours truly lives, in the Netherlands (aka Holland). It's about the besieged journey from Eindhoven to Arnhem where tremendous battles were fought.

Exactly that road, Highway 69; the road from Eindhoven to Arnhem was later nicknamed: Hell's Highway.

One of the most impressive details is that the area of Operation Market garden was completely reconstructed by historical documents and images. It's uncanny to see and experience the design of 1944 Holland. Even now in 2008 you can still see striking similarities from our country. Street signs, building structures, clothing and even the clinker bricks on the roads dispense a true authentic mood. This reviewer is Dutch, so what level would be more appropriate than one of the starting levels, in a field in the Netherlands, moving towards a large windmill ahead of us. Lots of geometry is to be found here and in fact one of the more complex scenes to render for the GPU.

Image Quality - All settings to HIGH.

ATI Radeon HD 4870 CrossfireX (2 GPUs - 2 Cards)

So we start off with two Radeon HD 4870 cards setup in Crossfire. Very simple task; two cards inserted into the motherboard and connected with the Crossfire connectors.

The blue line, our decent Core 2 Duo 3.0 GHz based X58 platform with 2 GB 1333 MHz DDR3 memory and some very tight timings. A PC like this is perfectly fine for single card configurations, even for a single GeForce GTX 280 or single Radeon HD 4870.

Then the green line, these are the same two graphics cards with the same drivers (Catalyst 8.10) but now on the X58 based Core i7 965 PC. This already is a pretty significant performance difference. But we are actually GPU bound here.

Let's have a look at two Radeon HD 4870 X2 setup in CrossfireX.

ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 CrossfireX (4 GPUs - 2 Cards)

So here we see two Radeon HD 4870 X2 setup in CrossfireX, bummer... Crossfire doesn't seem to kick in with the Catalyst 8.10 driver whatsoever. Moving onwards to some NVIDIA offerings then.

Allow me to sidetrack for a second here as I know they'll read it:

• Four stringent words to ATI staff: User Creatable Crossfire Profiles.