We've switched over to AMD's Phenom quad-core processor for our video card benchmarks and also exchanged out a few games. Here's our current test system.

Our test system was Windows XP Professional SP2 with 8.2 revision of ATI's Catalyst drivers and 169.28 for Nvidia.

Let's start things off with Crysis, the most advanced game engine on the market currently.

The 3870X2 does perform very well in Crysis but as we can see does a Radeon 3870 and Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GT. We were hoping for a bigger gain but we believe their Vista drivers might perform better which we'll look at in a later article.

The World in Conflict demo gives us results somewhat more along the lines we were expecting, although the RTS doesn't shift dramatically with a change in cards.