ATI Radeon HD 3850 - first benchmarks!

Posted at: 5:01am 15th November 2007 by Ben Hardwidge

We test ATI's new mid-range graphics chip on Crysis, Unreal Tournament 3, Company of Heroes and a whole load of other games. At £110, is this the bargain of the year?

Performance

Of course, DirectX 10.1 isn’t even available yet, let alone supporting games, so this is all academic at the moment. The big question is how the 3850 performs in current games, and the answer is that it’s awesome for a mid-range card. Our standard test games – F.E.A.R., Need for Speed: Carbon and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. proved no problem for the 3850 at up to 1,680 x 1,050, where the card managed a solid minimum of 25fps (see the results below for details of the levels of AA and AF used).

Unsurprisingly, though, the card turned into a stuttering wreck at 1,920 x 1,200, which is undoubtedly because the card only has 256MB of RAM and a tight 256-bit memory interface. That said, the 3850 could still cope with Unreal Tournament 3 at this resolution, but that could well be because no anti-aliasing is used in the test, which is what really takes advantage of extra memory and bandwidth.

However, the card coped less well with the DirectX 10 Company of Heroes benchmark, which isn’t surprising considering that every current DX10 card struggles with this benchmark, but it’s still disappointing. Similarly, the card was mercilessly crushed by the Crysis demo’s GPU benchmark, with an awful minimum frame rate of 7fps. Again, though, there isn’t a card out there that doesn’t struggle with Crysis at Very High settings. This is probably what you’ll need four cards for at the moment, which is ridiculous, but that doesn’t stop the Radeon HD 3850 being the best mid-range GPU out there.

Conclusion

ATI has adopted an interesting approach with the Radeon HD 3850 by going for the mid-range rather than the high-end market. With the 3870 presumably challenging the 8800 GT, this leaves the 3850 replacing the previous midrange Radeon HD 2600XT as the competitor to the GeForce 8600 GT, and it blows both of these cards away in terms of performance.

Considering that we haven’t had a truly decent mid-range card since the GeForce 6600 GT, then this is something that ATI should be truly proud of. At just £110, the Radeon HD 3850 is a veritable bargain for the money. Good work, ATI, and welcome back.

See here for the full benchmark results.