Anyway, if you guys have got any HD3850's and Crysis' demo for example, could you run a benchmark @ 1280*1024 and medium/high detail, with 2X AA enabled and without? It'd be nice to know what kind of performance the 3850 would get in those settings...
alright i didnt do any hard benchmarks but ill tell you how it runs for me, if you have everything at medium it runs great. 30+ all the way, this is overclocked mind you, 770 core, 1000 mem, on a e2140 oc'ed to 2.8 with 2 gigs of ram.
most of the settings have a negligible impact on framerate, the ones that do though, and are not suprisingly the ones that make the game look awesome are the postprocessing setting and the shader level setting.
the post processing includes the motion blur and the godrays, which look phenominal by the way, and the edge antialiasing, which makes the leaves blend in with the sky. very high really hurts performance.
the shader level setting is probably most important, it enables normal maps at the high setting and parallel occlusion maps at very high. these really make a bigger difference to the image quality particularly in a well lit area, than higher texture settings. imo anyway. the performance hit here, is also pretty significant,
everyone freaks out about the water, it looks nice but its not really worth the performance hit to me.
with those 2 settings maxed and everything else on medium except for textures and shadows the game looks great but it runs at 15-25 fps or around there. its playable but youll miss alot and its frustrating.
but if you manually edit the config files its easy to get to a setting that is very playable and good looking.
if i could do it all over though, i wouldve waited till the 3870's were back in stock. incidentally newegg has a 512mb gecube 3850 in stock, for $209.
thats probably your best bet, especially if you want aa. aa totally destroys the framerate, even 2x. new drivers might help but its probably just because it only has 256 mb of framebuffer. and its constantly swapping data back and forth to main memory.