The Crytek Test

Ok, I finally had some time to sit down at my 4890 again and do some playing around with it to see if it really did finally resolve the problems I've had with both the 8800gtx I had in this machine and the 9800m I have in my gaming laptop.  I will give specs at the bottom of the blog of each machine so those of you interested will know exactly what I'm currently running.  These tests were with my desktop with the ATI 4890 installed and with my gaming laptop which has the 9800m installed.

Far Cry 2

The first test was with the 4890... what I did was a test to see what Far Cry 2 considered as "optimal" and then I did another test with the settings all the way up, which on the desktop was "very high".   Setting optimal put all settings for Far Cry 2 at high:

And here is a similar screenshot at very high:

Not just a huge amount of difference there, I'm definitely pleased with the results.  Here is the a similar screen shot on the 9800m:

I can sense a level of ambiance(?) with the 9800m, but overall it seems the 4890 is the most appealing to me personally.

Here's another shot from the 4890... I haven't played the game in a while and didn't remember smoke coming from the campfire's:

But apparently there was smoke cause it's in the 9800m screenshot as well.  the odd part is I'm fairly sure I choose the same times for both of these screenshots (around 8:00p in game) but the 9800m has a lot more shadows (I also noticed it seems later in the series of screenshots above, maybe the times were off):

I can't decide if I consider that good or bad though... but it looks like the 4890 still has a degree more detail than the 9800m.

Crysis

Ok I did the same thing with Crysis, first did a test with the 4890 at what Crysis considered "Optimal" and then I ran another test with the graphics turned all the way up.  Crysis put the optimal settings at Medium:

And here's a similar screenshot with the graphics at very high:

You can barely see the sunrays coming off the left most tree.  No screen shot captured the way the sunrays looked in either far cry 2 or crysis, it's very cool though!  You can probably tell in videos which I'm sure you can find at any of the various video sites if you're really interested.  (Here's one for crysis... watch in high def: www.youtube.com/watch)

Now to the 9800m... well this is where the majority of my morning was spent.  Xfire would not work in game so I couldn't get the screen shot using xfire.  Print Screen would only produce a black rectangle when pasted into my image editing app, and doing some brief research said F12 would produce a screenshot in game from which it did not. Also, during the process of making this one picture, my laptop crashed 6 times.  I was finally able to get the screen shot by using Fraps:

If you look at the mountain in the background you can see the extra detail the 4890 provides vs. the 9800m. 

Crysis Warhead

I would have done this game too... But I seem to have misplaced my product key...

Verdict

Pro PC Gaming - Far Cry 2 looks amazing on the 4890, but I've never seen it on the 360 so I really have nothing to compare it to.  It would be nice to only have to take one machine to work with me - I can be working and as soon as I finish working I just pop in the disc and fire up the game.  No lock ups on the 4890 gives me new hope that once I get this machine fully upgraded I may be able to do that.

Pro Console Gaming - Crysis crashed 6 times on my laptop!!!! Xfire had to be set to dx10 mode on my desktop to work in game on both games, and didn't work at all in Crysis on the laptop.  I had to install yet another app to finally get it to work.  And of course not needing a product key to play games on the XBox 360 (or install them for that matter) is a plus.

Conclusion - I'm still not 100% pro pc gaming again but it's definitely fun to work on when I have the money to work on it.  If upgrading the cpu and motherboard finally remove the lag I'll be 100% pro pc gaming again.

STILL TO COME - I *do* have both the pc version and the 360 version of Call of Duty 4 so I will try to work out a comparison between the 4890, 9800m and the 360 for it.  Also in the next few weeks I should be able to upgrade the cpu and motherboard and I'll do benchmarks.

Laptop Specs: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU P8400 @ 2.26GHz (2 CPUs), ~2.3GHz, 4090MB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 9800M GTS 512MB Dedicated, Vista 64-bit

Desktop Specs: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+ (2 CPUs), ~2.3GHz, 2046MB RAM, ATI Radeon HD 4890 1GB, Vista 32-bit