Crysis demo
Crytek has included a GPU benchmarking facility with the Crysis demo that consists of a fly-through of the island in which the opening level of the game is set, and we used it. For this test, we set all of the game's quality options at "high" (not "very high") and set the display resolution to—believe it or not—1280x800 with 4X antialiasing. Even that was a little bit rough on some of the cards, so we tried again with antialiasing disabled and the game's post-processing effects set to "Medium." At these lower settings, we expanded the field to include some older and lower-end graphics cards, to see how they compare.

The HD 3850 and the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB—especially the GeForce—both seem to suffer here because of their smaller amounts of onboard memory. Beyond that, the results are mixed. The HD 3870 again performs almost exactly like the 2900 XT. With 4X antialiasing and high-quality post-processing enabled, the HD 3870 hits the same median low score as the GeForce 8800 GT, though with a slower average. Without AA and enhanced post-processing, though, the HD 3870 trails the GT significantly.

By the way, I've excluded multi-GPU configs from this test because the Crysis demo and these driver revisions don't appear to get along. Nvidia has just released some SLI-capable drivers, and we're expecting a patch for the full game to enable better multi-GPU support. We'll have to follow up with results from the full game later.

Unreal Tournament 3 demo
We tested the UT3 demo by playing a deathmatch against some bots and recording frame rates during 60-second gameplay sessions using FRAPS. This method has the advantage of duplicating real gameplay, but it comes at the expense of precise repeatability. We believe five sample sessions are sufficient to get reasonably consistent and trustworthy results. In addition to average frame rates, we've included the low frames rates, because those tend to reflect the user experience in performance-critical situations. In order to diminish the effect of outliers, we've reported the median of the five low frame rates we encountered.

Because the Unreal engine doesn't support multisampled antialiasing, we tested without AA. Instead, we just cranked up the resolution to 2560x1600 and turned up the demo's quality sliders to the max. I also disabled the demo's frame rate cap before testing.

Once more, the HD 3870 does its best 2900 XT impression, turning in very similar frame rates. The 3870 is a little slower than the 8800 GT here, but you'll be hard-pressed to feel the difference subjectively.

The poor HD 3850 is a bit overmatched at this resolution, which is to be expected from a 256MB graphics card. Pardon my impulse to stress things. To keep things in perspective, the HD 3850 will run the UT3 demo as smooth as glass at 1920x1200 with these same quality settings, averaging 52 frames per second and hitting a low of 30 FPS.