Benchmarks: Far Cry, F.E.A.R
Despite suffering an early loss to the GeForce 8800 GT in Crysis, the ASUS Radeon HD 3870 makes a swift comeback in Far Cry beating the competition by a 10% margin. The Radeon HD 3870 was only slightly slower than the GeForce 8800 GTX which is truly impressive. So far in Far Cry the Radeon HD 3870 has provided massive performance gains over the older Radeon HD 2900XT.
This next batch of Far Cry results has been run at the same resolutions, but this time with 4xAA/16xAF enabled. This allows the GeForce 8800 GT to retain its lead over the Radeon HD 3870, though the performance margins were very minimal at the higher resolutions. So far then the Radeon HD 3870 is fairing very well in Windows XP against the competition.
Next up we have F.E.A.R and as you can see, the ASUS Radeon HD 3870 is less impressive in this title. At 1920x1200 where we were still able to obtain very playable performance, the Radeon HD 3870 was 15% slower than the GeForce 8800 GT. Nevertheless, 63fps at 1920x1200 in F.E.A.R is impressive for a $220 graphics card.
Turning on 4xAA/16xAF settings eliminated the possibility of playing at 1920x1200 and forced to fall back to 1680x1050. At this resolution the Radeon HD 3870 was 13% slower than the GeForce 8800 GT, which works out to be an average of 9fps.