Sapphire 4850×2 2GB PCIe Graphics Card

 
Unreal Tournament 3 is the highly anticipated game from Epic Games and Midway. The game uses the latest Unreal engine, which combines fast gameplay along with high quality textures and lighting effects. All benchmarks were performed using UTbench with a fly-by of the DM-BioHazard map. As usual, all benchmarks were performed 5 times, with the highest and lowest results being removed and an average calculated from the remaining three.
 
GRID
 
Race Driver: Grid is a visually taxing game that presents a challenge to any graphics system. Results were recorded using FRAPS to log the average FPS over a 2 minute race. To ensure consistency, the same track, car and general path of travel was used in each of the 5 benchmark runs for each graphics card, with an average FPS being calculated from the median three results.
 
 
Company of Heroes is Relic’s first title to make use of the “Essence Engine”. This engine was designed and coded from scratch by Relic in order to make use of special graphical effects, including high dynamic range lighting, dynamic lighting & shadows, advanced shader effects and normal mapping. On May 29, 2007 Relic released a DX10 patch for Company of Heroes which was applied for this test.  Running the in game performance test 5 times, the highest and lowest scores were omitted with the average calculated from the remaining 3.

 

Results Analysis

Predictably, the GTX stomps all over the 4850×2 in Unreal Tournament thanks to the PhysX processing but the tables are turned in GRID with the 4850×2 returning the favour. However GRID showed some texture and shadow corruption which is most likely due to immature drivers. Company of Heroes produced a mix bag of results with the 4850×2 winning out at higher resolutions.

Let’s head over to the next set of benchmarks…