Testing (continued):
Team Fortress 2:
Team Fortress 2 is a game available in "The Black Box", and it was also analyzed using FRAPS. For testing purposes the game was played on the well map with a resolution of 1280x1024 and high settings.
We once again see that the two cards perform about the same and the Sapphire card puts up a slightly better score in terms of average frame rates. Both cards would provide perfectly smooth game play, but when you assign a number to the performance the Sapphire card wins.
Call of Juarez:
Call of Juarez is a first person shooter game with a wild west setting. A free download is available that benchmarks the game's DirectX 10 capabilities, and it was used to test the two overclocked Radeon HD3870 cards.
The results above were achieved with the resolution set to 1280x1024 and high settings. Another close competition, and while the Sapphire card takes a slight lead in terms of maximum frame rate, the ASUS card squeaks out higher scores in terms of average and minimum frame rates.
Track Mania Nations Forever:
The final game to be used to test the Sapphire Toxic Radeon HD3870 is Track Mania Nations Forever. I have found myself playing this game far too much since its release in the middle of April, and decided to use it in this review, too. A built in benchmarking utility was used to test the performance at a resolution of 1280x1024, while the settings were varied from 4x antialiasing and 4x anisotropic filtering to 8x antialiasing and 8x anisotropic filtering.
Here we see that the
Sapphire card handles this game better in both configurations, providing about 5% more frames per second than the ASUS card.
Overall the two cards are far too closely matched to declare a real winner in terms of performance. The ASUS card does better in synthetic benchmarks, and it is clear that the higher GPU clock speed is the reason. The ASUS card will not overclock at all without a BIOS modification, but the Sapphire card can be overclocked by up to 85MHz through the Overdrive tab. The benchmarking and gaming results are all close at the stock speeds, but when overclocked the Sapphire card takes the lead pretty much right across the board.
