February 15th, 2011

Sapphire 4870 x2

Unreal Tournament 3

Crysis

Unreal Tournament 3 is a first person shooter developed by Epic Games and is the follow up to best selling FPS Unreal Tournament 2004. UT3 is based on the Unreal Engine 3. There is an incredible amount of information about what UE3 supports, but in a nutshell:

Multi-threaded rendering
All modern per-pixel lighting techniques
Advanced dynamic shadows
Volumetric environmental effects including height fog
Split-screen rendering
Physics driven objects and sounds powered by Ageia’s PhysX technology
Extensible particle system with visual editor

For more detailed information on what UE3 is capable of, check out Epic’s Unreal Engine Technology site, here.

Thanks go to the guys at Olrac.org for putting this benchmark together.

Settings

For all Vista tests, DX10 mode was used, and for XP DX9 was used.

High: 1600 x 1200, Level detail 5, model detail 5.
Medium: 1280 x 1024, level detail 5, model detail 5.
Low: 1280 x 1024, level detail 1, model detail 1.

Map: CTF-Omicron-Dawn-bots
No. of Bots: 12

Something that must be noted before reading the results is that Unreal Tournament 3′s benchmark is based around bots running around a level. This means that the benchmark runs differently each time although the environment is the same. This has an affect on benchmarking which is why we repeat the tests 3 times and take the average of the scores.

Sapphire 4870 x2

Interesting here, in Vista low and medium settings trounce the XP results, however at high settings the frame rate dips slightly.

Noise

When at full tilt, the 4870 x2 is like a jet engine; it’s incredibly noisy but this is only when it’s stressed for long periods of time. When at idle, and during short gaming sessions it’s acceptable, but still quite a noisy card. Silence enthusiasts should steer clear.

Cost

A 4870 x2 from Sapphire will set you back around £370 which makes this the most expensive card (though there might be more expensive 4870s) out there right now. The equivalent most expensive nVidia card is knocking around at £300.