Here is our current test system.

Our test OS was Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 with Nvidia's 175.19 of Forceware drivers and ATI Catalyst 8.6 Hotfix. All the latest software revisions were used in our testing.

Crysis seems to be one of the last games that still favors Nvidia at this time with the 9800 GTX cards just coming out on top. Hopefully with some more optimizations ATI will be able to pull out and take the lead in Crytek's very advanced shooter.

Unreal Tournament 3 is the most popular graphics engine in use today and something we thus must test. Only at the highest 2560x1600 resolution does the 4870 in Crossfire seem to matter coming out on top by a number of frames per second here.

Quake Wars is one of the last Open GL games on the market and may not have much of a life longer as an API for games but for now it's something we'll be testing. We re-did some testing from our 4850 review and here we see ATI in the lead with id software's game, one of the few times we could say that but it is definitely the case now.

Age of Conan is easily one of the most popular new games on the PC and the new 4000 series of cards edge out Nvidia at 2560x1600. 4870 Crossfire is one exception we ran across an anomaly there where performance was simply unplayable though 4850 Crossfire works fine. Both SLI and Crossfire see huge gains here except for the 4870 anomaly.

In 3DMark 2006 the 4870 just edges out the 9800 GTX.

Now let's took a look at power consumption. For load we ran only 3DMark Vantage feature tests that stressed the graphics card only.