Radeon HD 4850 and 4870 CrossfireX - 4 - Crossfire performance: Performance Scaling | Mass Effect

Performance Scaling

Now before we actually begin and stare yourself blind at the charts we'll present to you, I'd like to show you a little scaling. Face it, most of you have an GeForce 9600 GT graphics card right ? Let me place that card as baseline performance in a chart:

Now above you are looking at Call of Duty 4 with the settings mentioned below. Let's take the GeForce 9600 GT at 1920x1200 and we'll quickly notice we have an okay 31 frame per second framerate on average.

This BTW is the All Ghillied up level (ACT 2), a little more heavy on the GPU than some other sites use for testing.

Image Quality setting:

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

One single 4870 already pushes the score up-to 60 FPS. 2x 4850 pushes an amazing 102 FPS and 2x 4870 go pretty nuts at 128 FPS. The baseline performance for Crossfire is really good, scaling is just excellent.

Right, that being said, let startup the other tests and compare with the GeForce GTX 280 as this is what we are not competing with price and performance wise. Such interesting stuff eh ?

Gaming: Mass Effect

Controversial, new and definitely one of the bigger titles of the year. Mass Effect from BioWare. Originally released for the XBOX 360 it unveiled a vast, beautiful galaxy populated by diverse, fascinating alien races. Players stepped onto this stage as Commander Shepard, a hero at the vanguard of humanity's ascension in the arena of galactic politics, and thus began an epic story bolstered by engaging characters and rich, branching dialogue.

Set 200 years in the future in an epic universe, Mass Effect places gamers in a vast galactic community in danger of being conquered by a legendary agent gone rogue. A spectacular new vision from legendary developers BioWare, Mass Effect challenges players to lead a squad of freedom fighters as they struggle against threatening armies to restore peace in the land.

I started playing this game merely a week ago and just had to include it in our benchmark suite. We had to overcome some problems though, a nasty framerate cap was removed and the game actually does not support AA. It does however show really awesome graphics, complex facial animations and applies a noise filter just to get you that really nice cinematic feeling. Overall one of the better games I've played this year so far. Definitely pick it up.

Mass Effect Settings:

• Noise Filter on
• Textures: Extreme high
• Filter: Anisotropic
• Everything maxed out

I mean, the screenshot below is literally the quality you play at. Anyway, focus at the chart please. Follow the green lines, indeed these are both the 4850 and 4870 setup in Crossfire. Leading performance. No GTX 280 results just yet. NVIDIA needed the cards back, though this week I'll have some new ones. In the VGA charts we'll include these results pretty soon.

Also notice that i threw in the results of some 4800 cards mixed. I took 2x 4870 and 1x 4850. Apparently the drivers are not ready for it as all results where showing abnormal below par behavior. We think that the combo resulted into one 4870+4850 actually rendering. the exception was 3DMark (as always).

So please focus on the 2-way Crossfire results, as really thy are amazing.