AGP not dead; runs high detail Crysis at 25 FPS

Atomic reviews the Sapphire AGP HD3850 and finds out how much life this hugely powerful card can bring to your old AGP machine.

Some of us can’t afford to worry about the latest graphics benchmarks. That’s because the PCI-E revolution has left us behind, and we’re still running on antiquated AGP systems because for one reason or other, we just can’t justify an “upgrade” (read: an entirely new computer) to play new games.

If you fall into this category, all is not lost -- there is a new graphics card that you need to know about. Sapphire has released, in AGP 8x form, the Radeon HD 3850 -- ATI’s second most powerful card ever (as of April 2008, the term "ever" has been accurate).

It retails for about $270, and may be the stepping-stone you need to get that last mile out of your old hardware - it’s one of the very rare breeds of AGP cards that support Shader Model 4.1. That alone unlocks a whole slather of new games and murders Vista’s minimum requirements!

It’s immensely powerful, but it’s not a magic bullet. Almost every game released in the last year assumes that you have your own personal supercomputer and will tax your CPU, memory, hard disk and power bill accordingly. While everything we threw at it was definitely playable and looked stunning, we still didn’t see blistering performance on modest hardware. But after a few tweaks and upgrades to our test benches, we managed to get Crysis running...

More about that and the results on the next page.