There has been a lot of talk around the upgrade of OirectX 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 HO 3850 is the frrstcard 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 HDM!, they didn't come with dedicated in-built ports for HOM!. So the in-built HOM! port with 5.1 surround sound, included with this card, is a welcome change (allowing you to connect your HOMI 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 AT! 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.

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Keeping in mind that HD 3850 is not the highest end card from AT!, 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 Un¬real Tournament 3, we got good results though not extraordinary, but still good enough to catch the attention of any gamer.