ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB CrossFire

These tests were completed using the following hardware: Core i7 920, MSI Eclipse SLI motherboard, 2x ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB in CrossFire, 3x 2GB Corsair DDR3-1,066 at 6-5-5-15-1T, Seagate 7200.10 250GB SATA HDD.

Crysis

Publisher: Electronic Arts

We tested the game using the 64-bit executable under and DirectX 10 with the 1.21 patch applied. We used a custom timedemo recorded on the Harbor map which is more representative of gameplay than the built-in benchmark that renders things much faster than you're going to experience in game.

For our testing, we set all the settings to High. Because of how intense the game is, we tested with both anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering disabled at resolutions above 1,680 x 1,050 for the time being. There is currently no support for anisotropic filtering in the game, but you can still force it from the driver control panel.


A pair of Radeon HD 4870 1GB cards running in CrossFire seem to benefit from some pretty significant improvements in Crysis with the Service Pack 2 beta installed - we witnessed a 9.2 percent increase, which is going to be fairly noticeable in real world gaming scenarios at the frame rates we're seeing here.

Far Cry 2

Publisher: Ubisoft

Far Cry 2 is the latest first person shooter from Ubisoft and it's one of the most hotly-anticipated games of this year. While it continues the Far Cry franchise that Crytek started in 2004, Far Cry 2 is built on its own in-house engine and has no association to anything Crytek has worked on or is working on now.

The game uses DirectX 10.1 to improve anti-aliasing performance and quality. The improvements are made by reading the multisampled depth buffer in a single pass - something that was only introduced officially with DirectX 10.1. However, Ubisoft has also made the enhancements available to Nvidia hardware as well through a DirectX 10 extension.

We used a retail version of the game and the in-built gameplay demo set to Ultra-Very High settings under DirectX 10.1.


Far Cry 2 also posted a performance increase with CrossFire as well, although the advances weren't quite as profound as they were in Crysis. The average frame rate increased by just 0.4 fps, while the minimum saw a 2.7 frames per second improvement - normally, that would mean smoother gameplay, but since the minimum is already over 30 fps, the overall feel isn't going to change that much if we're frank.