Radeon HD 4870 X2: Four Cards Compared

Crysis v1.21 High Quality

With an overclocked CPU, the dual-chip GeForce 9800 GX2 really speeds up. Turn on anti-aliasing, however, and the performance drops, which is due to the 2 x 512 MB graphics memory. The Radeon HD 4870 X2 cannot pull away from Nvidia. Only with anti-aliasing and high resolutions does improve its standing.

It’s nice to see that the Radeon HD 4870 512 still shows its full performance even with CrossFire, whereas Nvidia runs into problems with its 512 MB (9800 GX2, 9800 GTX+) and anti-aliasing. The power of the overclocked quad-core CPU is utilized very well by all of the benchmarked cards.

Driver Comparison: Catalyst 8.9 Versus Catalyst 8.10 w/ Radeon HD 4870 X2

The measured differences are within the margin of measurement error, so there is no real optimization to see.

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Crysis High in fps12800xAA16800xAA19200xAA12804xAA16804xAA19204xAAOverall
HD 4870 X2 8.10 QX@3.6734.231.131.231.829.129.1186.5
HD 4870 X2 8.9 QX@3.6734.531.631.332.129.429.5188.4
Performance difference in percent-0.9-1.6-0.3-0.9-1.0-1.4-1.0