Diamond Viper Radeon HD 3850 Ruby edition - 8 - Game Performance: Crysis & Call of Duty 4

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.

Let's have a look and suit up in our best cloaking gear for COD4. 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.

For this review I've picked two ATI and two NVIDIA graphics card. On NVIDIA's side I've opted for the GeForce 9600 GT. The card is now roughly priced similar to the Radeon 3850, though slightly more expensive. This is the card where you need to put your focus on while comparing.

I've also included the Radeon HD 3870 X2 into the results. Should you in the future want to opt to go for this card in Crossfire, that would roughly be the performance you get returned with a two GPU setup.

Image Quality setting:

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

The level where we measure and the image quality settings used

Gaming: Crysis - Single Player v1.2

With mankind facing an alien cataclysm, your elite Delta force and North Korean forces combine, united by common humanity in a battle to save Earth. Graphically stunning, tactically challenging and always intensely immersive, Crysis sets player choice at the heart of its gameplay, with customizable tactical weaponry and adaptable armor allowing instant response to changing conditions. Crysis doesn't feel all that different from its predecessor, Far Cry. Both are set on an island. Both involve a latent alien menace. Both bid you move more or less linearly through shaggy jungle areas, where the fact that you're progressing in a single direction is camouflaged by your ability to approach obstacles in your path any way you like. Think the "every time you play a situation yields radically different behaviors and results" approach in games like Rainbow Six Vegas or Gears of War except on more of a geographic scale.

Oh yeah, you probably want to hear about how it performs, right?

Image Quality setting:

• 0x Anti Aliasing
• 16x anisotropic filtering

With Medium Image Quality settings up-to 1920x1200 is actually playable ...  which is pretty okay to be honest. Mind you that we measure in the absolute toughest section of the game. On the beach with loads of textures, shaders, moving objects. So there certainly are other spots in the game where your graphics card will reproduce much higher framerates.

Few results as we are re-doing all Crysis numbers. A recent bug in NVIDIA's drivers showed that disabling VSYNC actually lowered the results in the resolutions up-to 1280x1024. The 9600 GT and the cheaper Radeon HD 3850 are pretty close to each other performance wise.