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GeForce 9600 GT vs. Radeon HD 3870

Published February 26, 2008
By Steven Walton

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Benchmarks: System Specs & UT3

Test System Specs: Hardware
- Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 (3.00GHz) LGA775

- x2 OCZ DDR2 PC2-6400 CL4 FlexXLC Edition Module(s)

- ASUS P5N-T Deluxe (NVIDIA nForce 780i SLI)
- Gigabyte X48-DQ6 (Intel X48)

- OCZ GameXStream (700 watt)

- Seagate 500GB 7200RPM (Serial ATA II)

- ASUS GeForce 9600 GT (512MB) SLI
- ASUS GeForce 9600 GT (512MB)
- ASUS Radeon HD 3870 (512MB) Crossfire
- ASUS Radeon HD 3870 (512MB)

Software
- Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate (64-bit)
- nForce 9.46
- Intel System Driver 8.4.0.1016
- Nvidia Forceware 174.16
- ATI Catalyst 8.2

First up we have Unreal Tournament 3 and as you can see the GeForce 9600 GT is 11% slower than the Radeon HD 3870 at 1920x1200, which equates to a mere 9fps.

Both graphics cards were able to deliver over 70fps on average at this resolution, which is very impressive. When adding a second graphics card we found that the 9600 GTs were 13% slower than the Radeons at this same high resolution.

In terms of scalability, the Radeon HD 3870 became 37% faster when adding a second card, whereas the GeForce 9600 GT gained 34% more performance.