Crysis
Rather than use a timedemo, we tested Crysis by playing the game and using FRAPS to record frame rates. Because this way of doing things can introduce a lot of variation from one run to the next, we tested each card in five 60-second gameplay sessions.

Also, we've chosen a new area for testing Crysis. This time, we're on a hillside in the recovery level having a firefight with six or seven of the bad guys. As before, we've tested at two different settings, with the game's "High" quality presets and with its "Very high" ones, also.

Crysis gives us our first look at AMD's newest CrossFire couplet, whose performance flirts with that of the GeForce GTX 280. Running only a single card, the Radeon HD 4850 and GeForce 9800 GTX look evenly matched. The latter is quicker with Crysis' high-quality detail setting, while the former takes the lead if you crank the eye candy all the way up.

Assassin's Creed
There has been some controversy surrounding the PC version of Assassin's Creed, but we couldn't resist testing it, in part because it's such a gorgeous, well-produced game. Also, hey, we were curious to see how the performance picture looks for ourselves. The originally shipped version of this game can take advantage of the Radeon HD 3870 GPU's DirectX 10.1 capabilities to get a performance boost with antialiasing, and as you may have heard, Ubisoft chose to remove the DX10.1 path in an update to the game. we chose to test the game without this patch, leaving DX10.1 support intact.

We used our standard FRAPS procedure here, five sessions of 60 seconds each, while free-running across the rooftops in Damascus. All of the game's quality options were maxed out, and we had to edit a config file manually in order to enable 4X AA at this resolution. Eh, it worked.

The Radeon HD 4850 slots in between the GeForce GTX 280 and 260 in Assassin's Creed, putting it well ahead of the 9800 GTX. Note that the Radeon has the same median low frame rate as Nvidia's latest high-end behemoth.