The Fastest 3D Cards Go Head-To-Head

Features
By Tino Kreiss
published

Mass Effect

Thanks to the UT3 Engine, Mass Effect runs in DirectX 10 mode under Vista. SLI and CrossFire run excellently at 1920x1200 pixels. With anti-aliasing turned on, a second graphics card almost doubles the frame rate. With the more powerful Nvidia models, SLI benefits are only visible as of the higher resolutions with AA. CrossFire, on the other hand, can provide a little more power even without anti-aliasing.

The GeForce 8600 has minor problems with anti-aliasing—the game may crash or freeze, and with the lower frame rate, Mass Effect is not playable. Without anti-aliasing, only the GeForce 8600 and Radeon HD 3650 are too slow. But with anti-aliasing in the higher resolutions, more cards start to run out of steam. The additional graphics memory increment—from 512 to 1,024 MB—had no effect on the 8800 GT.

In order to get the anti-aliasing to work with the Radeon HD 3000-series cards, you need to rename MassEffect.exe to Bioshock.exe. This can lead to graphics errors, but the test system and benchmark scene showed no signs of this. The new Radeon HD 4000-series doesn’t need to have this trick applied. Anti-aliasing is supported with no problems. Resolutions marked with a value of zero indicate that they did not work properly with the specified test card.

Tino Kreiss
146 Comments Comment from the forums
  • San Pedro
    Looks like the results for SLI and Crossfire were switched with the single card results. . .
    Reply
  • Duncan NZ
    Not a bad article, really comprehensive.
    My one complaint? Why use that CPU when you know that the test cards are going to max it out? Why not a quad core OC'ed to 4GHz? It'd give far more meaning to the SLI results. We don't want results that we can duplicate at home, we want results that show what these cards can do. Its a GPU card comparason, not a complain about not having a powerful enough CPU story.

    Oh? And please get a native english speaker to give it the once over for spelling and grammar errors, although this one had far less then many articles posted lately.
    Reply
  • elbert
    No 4870x2 in CF so its the worlds top end Nvidia vs ATI mid to low end.
    Reply
  • Lightnix
    It'd be a good article if you'd used a powerful enough CPU and up to date Radeon drivers (considering we're now up to 8.8 now), I mean are those even the 'hotfix' 8.6's or just the vanilla drivers?
    Reply
  • elbert
    Version AMD Catalyst 8.6? Why not just say i'm using ATI drivers with little to no optimizations for the 4800's. This is why the CF benchmarks tanked.
    Reply
  • at 1280, all of the highend cards were CPU limited. at that resolution, you need a 3.2-3.4 c2d to feed a 3870... this article had so much potential, and yet... so much work, so much testing, fast for nothing, because most of the results are very cpu limited (except 1920@AA).
    Reply
  • wahdangun
    WTF, hd4850 SHOULD be a lot faster than 9600 GT and 8800 GT even tough they have 1Gig of ram
    Reply
  • mjam
    No 4870X2 and 1920 X 1200 max resolution tested. How about finishing the good start of an article with the rest of it...
    Reply
  • I agree, the 4870 X2 should have been in there and should have used the updated drivers. Good article but I think you fell short on finishing it.
    Reply
  • @pulasky - Rage much? It's called driver issues you dumbass. Some games are more optimised for multicard setups than others, and even then some favour SLi to Crossfire. And if you actually READ the article rather than let your shrinken libido get the better of you, you'll find that Crossfire does indeed work in CoD4.

    Remember, the more you know.
    Reply