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#946 - HIS HD3850 AGP Video Card |
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Written by Jared Maynard
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Tuesday, 22 April 2008 |
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Page 7 of 8
Image Quality:
Just a little blurb about 'Image Quality'. Games today like Crysis have been in the forefront with the promise of “very high visuals” that truly stimulate the gaming experience. However, there has been much controversy over the need for DirectX10 and Vista to achieve these visuals. DX10 supposedly provides enhancements over DX9, but the overhead of Vista proves to be the 'Achilles Heel' that negates many of these possible improvements.
For whatever reason, Crytek opted to make the ‘Very High’ graphic settings in Crysis a DX10 only feature. And 6 hours after the demos release, tweak guides started popping up all over the Internet to unlock these DX10 only features. So instead of thinking Vista or DX10, maybe we should be looking at HDR lighting and Shader Model support when in regards to gaming eye-candy. And that's something this video card definitely provides with Shader Model 4.1 Support.
At the time of the Crysis Demo release our 6800GT was unable to play with reasonable frame rates even at low settings. And even today many people with Highend systems have reported unplayable frame rates in Crysis with Vista in 'Very High' settings, but playable in XP in 'Very High' settings. Still, 10 ~ 20FPS is not an ideal playing speed for most players. If all these games provide is eye-candy and you can't play with that eye-candy, then really now, what's the point of playing them at all? But that never seems to stop us from trying and so we continue to upgrade past our systems bottlenecks as best we can.
In these images below we have screen shots with the HIS 3850 AGP card in Crysis using DirectX9 and 'Very high' settings turned on. These pictures definitely show that this card can deliver the goods. Playing at 1280x1024 we hovered closely to around 18 ~ 20+ FPS in wide open areas and 25 ~ 36+ in closed in spaces. And the best part is this card did all of that without any overclocking, now that's impressive!
Please note we are unable to provide DirectX10 images or benchmarks at this time. Nonetheless since we are talking about Apples to Oranges in software here. We feel safe in saying that the HIS HD3850 AGP video card will definitely handle DX10 very well. Just expect some limitations with the rest of your system should you decide to upgrade to Windows Vista because of the heavy overhead.
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