ATI Radeon HD 3850 Graphics Card

There has been a lot of talk around the upgrade of DirectX 10 from Microsoft

and the underlying concern that none of the current generation cards would be

able to leverage that upgrade. We've heard that both ATI and NVIDIA are planning

a series of next generation cards which would be compatible with Direct X 10.1.

Radeon HD 3850 is the first card from ATI that is compatible with Direct X 10.1.

It comes with as many as 320 stream processing units and is based on 55 nm

technology. Even though the earlier 2000 Series cards had support for HDMI, they

didn't come with dedicated in-built ports for HDMI. So the in-built HDMI port

with 5.1 surround sound, included with this card, is a welcome change (allowing

you to connect your HDMI capable LCD with the card for enhanced visual

experience). It also comes with support for ATI CrossFireX multi-GPU allowing

you to connect two to three cards in tandem on an ATI CrossFireX ready

motherboard and enjoy a mesmerizing gaming experience. In 3DMark06 the card gave

a score of 10943, which is much higher than previous generation Radeon cards.

Keeping in mind that HD 3850 is not the highest end card from ATI, the score

is very exciting as it shows we have more to look forward to when 3870 X2

arrives. We stressed the card with 3 graphics intensive games. For Company of

Heroes, the average score of 103 fps was good under max setting. While playing

Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3, we got good results though not extraordinary,

but still good enough to catch the attention of any gamer.

Bottomline: Among the first to cash on to the

new version of Direct X 10, this card is full on features and performance.