Benchmark Results: World In Conflict, Fallout 3, And Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X.
Overclocking provides a massive 42% increase in performance, although it’s clear we’re dealing with an equally massive system limitation at these settings.
Enabling anti-aliasing (AA) and 16x anisotropic filtering (AF) doesn’t impact performance of the stock $700 PC all the way up to 1920x1200. In fact, even the overclocked system only takes a two frame per second (FPS) hit when enabling eye candy at 1920x1200. At 2560x1600, these Radeon HD 4870s do far better than the Radeon HD 4850s in the September PC build, although some choppiness could result from using cards with a 512MB frame buffer.
Averaging over 60 FPS with minimums in the mid 30s, the stock $700 PC offers very playable performance in Fallout 3. At these settings, the overclocked $700 machine struggles to keep up with the stock PC from September.
Once again, the stock PC offers playable performance, although minimum frame rates now fall to the same 26 FPS as the overclocked September $650 PC did. The true power of the HD 4870s isn’t seen until 2560x1600, when the overclocked $700 system trounces the September system in both average and minimum FPS.
This test is highly graphics-oriented, as the overclocked September PC only keeps up with the stock December machine up until 1680x1050. Overclocking the CPU, FSB, and Radeon HD 4870s yields an average performance increase of 25% for this month’s system.
There is no question that the December PC wins at this game thanks to the more powerful graphics solution. While average frame rates at 2560x1600 were respectable this month and almost double what was seen with the September PC, we still couldn’t call the experience with these 512MB cards completely smooth.