ATI HD 3800 Review Thread

[DilTech]

AA seems OK


3Dmark 2006 @ AA 8x

The R6*** cards always did find with AA in 3dmark, it's games you'd have to test to verify AA.

As for dual 3850's matching an ultra, is that with, or without AA?

Also, from the same page you pulled that from...

Scaling looks pretty good from the Radeon HD 3850, however it's still not as good as what NVIDIA is able to achieve with the 8800 GT. NVIDIA consistently achieves about 11% better scaling from one to two GPUs than AMD.

The other problem with CrossFire is that it simply doesn't always work, so a pair of 3850s is not necessarily a better option than a single 8800 GT or GTX. Case in point would be the two other games that we wanted to include here: Quake Wars and Call of Duty 4, both gave us lower frame rates with CF enabled than without. AMD's release notes for the Radeon HD 3800 drivers informs us that some applications may show a performance decrease with CF enabled, so we're not too surprised.

While it'd be nice to be able to purchase two cheap cards and get better performance than the best out there, there are simply too many caveats to really embrace the idea.

Dual-cards is generally not a better idea than one strong single card. However, I would be interested to see the results of gaming with AA enabled CF vs a single 8800 GTX or ultra.