Results

Crysis in DX9 mode is an entirely different animal from DX10.  DirectX 10 really takes a VGA card to task with it's advanced graphics capabilities.  As we have all seen before, Crysis can bring video card GPUs to their knees.  Screen resolution for our testing was set to 1024 x 768 to give us the best game play possible.  All settings were set to 'high' with the exception of FSAA which again was kept off. 

Clearly, this is why everyone is talking about the HD4800 series.  Let's see more.

STALKER is a very resource intensive game with a variety of graphics settings within the game.  The most intensive of these is the 'Full Dynamic Lighting'.  This effectively turns on all the eye candy, grass and sun shadows as well as max detail for all areas.  Screen resolution is turned the to 1920 x 1440 for all cards.

This was a surprise.  Game play was going along swimmingly until we started running into some periods of dropping frames.  These places are very obvious above.  Kicking the screen resolution down to 1600 made everything smooth again.  I can only think that this is in part due to driver maturation/optimization as we didn't run into any issues like this in any other game title (certainly not limited to the ones used at benchmarks either).

Unreal Tournament 3 has been out for a while and is a DX9 based game.  It's graphics engine has a lot to challenge any VGA card however.  Using the Defiance map with 12 bots in Deathmatch we took a look at our card's performance.  All settings within the game were set to max with FSAA turned off.  Screen resolution is set to 1920 x 1440.

Right back into the middle of the action.  The numbers speak for themselves; an average frame rate higher than the dual GPU HD3870x2 and the 8800GT.
 

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Pg. 1 - Introduction
Pg. 2 - The Card
Pg. 3 - Installation/Noise/Test Bed
Pg. 4 - Benchmarks
Pg. 5 - Image Quality/Overclocking/Conclusion