Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
We'll start with Quake Wars since this game's simple "nettimedemo" allows us to record a gaming session and play it back with precise repeatability on a range of cards at a range of resolutions. Which is what we did. A lot.

We tested this game with 4X antialiasing and 16X anisotropic filtering enabled, along with "high" settings for all of the game's quality options except "Shader level" which was set to "Ultra." We left the diffuse, bump, and specular texture quality settings at their default levels, though, to be somewhat merciful to the 256MB and 320MB cards. Shadows, soft particles, and smooth foliage were enabled where possible, although the Radeon X1950 Pro wasn't capable of handling soft particles.

Mommy.

Sooo.. much.... data.

Where to start? I suppose by pointing out that we didn't test the Radeon HD 3870 in CrossFire because AMD only supplied us with a single card, despite our best efforts. We'll try to get a second one soon.

Beyond that, the HD 3800-series cards come out looking reasonably good here. The HD 3850 utterly trounces the GeForce 8600 GTS, Nvidia's lower-end offering with 256MB of memory. The "overclocked" version of the 8600 GTS we tested is selling for $169.99 at Newegg, but it's clearly outclassed by the HD 3850. Last year's models, the GeForce 7900 GS and Radeon X1950 Pro, are also quite a bit slower than the HD 3850. The 3850 doesn't fare too well in CrossFire, though, where it struggles to keep pace with a single HD 3870 and just doesn't appear to scale well.

As for the Radeon HD 3870, it shadows the GeForce 8800 GT from a distance of about five FPS at our two higher resolutions. That's pretty close, and the HD 3870 is delivering eminently acceptable frame rates at 1600x1200 with 4X AA and 16X aniso—no mean feat. Although it has substantially less memory bandwidth than the Radeon HD 2900 XT, the 3870 performs almost exactly the same, even up to 2560x1600 resolution. Perhaps that 512-bit memory interface was overkill, ya think?