ATI Radeon HD 3870 & 3850: A Return to Competition
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on November 15, 2007 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Pricing and Availability
It wasn't too long ago that every time we reviewed an ATI video card we had to complain about pricing and availability, not to mention that anytime either company released a new graphics card we'd get a friendly reminder email from NVIDIA letting us know how highly it values hard launches and immediate availability. This time around, the tables are turned, and while we still love NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GT, the fact of the matter is that the pricing and availability of those cards are just not what NVIDIA promised.
Leading up to the day the 8800 GT NDA lifted, you could actually purchase the 8800 GT for as little as $220 from a variety of online vendors. Once the embargo was lifted, the story changed considerably. Prices went from the expected $199 - $249 to a completely unexpected $250 - $300 range. Looking at our own price search engine we see that only Amazon is listing a card available at $249, but it's not in stock, nor are any of the other more expensive 8800 GTs listed.
The cheapest 8800 GT we can find at Newegg.com is $269 for either a XFX or PNY card, but neither are in stock, not to mention that the listed price is still $20 over what NVIDIA told us the maximum would be.
AMD will have you believe that NVIDIA simply can't make the 8800 GT cheap enough, citing die sizes and bill of materials costs. Without access to that sort of information, it's tough for us to verify, and NVIDIA isn't really willing to let us know exactly how much it costs to build one of these things. It's more likely however that NVIDIA didn't produce enough 8800 GTs to meet demand, which is understandable given how fast the part is. As we mentioned in our review of the card, it basically makes NVIDIA's entire product lineup obsolete. We've heard that during launch week, hundreds of thousands of boards were shipped out to add-in board vendors, which should start appearing soon, but at who knows what price.
It simply doesn't matter how good the 8800 GT if you can't buy it, and right now it's just not available. NVIDIA is promising that in the next two weeks we will see an influx of 256MB 8800 GT cards, and more 512MB cards are coming. NVIDIA's recommendation is to hop on a pre-order list if you want one, as new cards are coming in regularly and pre-orders are filled first. We don't know how the 256MB variants will perform, but NVIDIA claims that they will arrive at $179 - $199. Whether or not they will stay that way is another issue entirely.
All this brings us to AMD, and its proposed pricing/availability of the Radeon HD 3870 and 3850. The 3870 is supposed to retail for $219, while the 3850 will carry a $179 price tag. We've already mentioned that neither card is faster than the 8800 GT (we'll get to the numbers momentarily), but if AMD is actually able to hit these price points then the cards are still quite competitive.
We've gotten a lot of information about quantities of boards shipped from various manufacturers and vendors, and here's what we've been able to piece together. While there will be quantities of the 3870 and 3850 available at launch, it doesn't look like there will be any more of these two than there were of 8800 GTs at launch. Production will continue to ramp up and we expect to see multiple hundreds of thousands of cards from both AMD and NVIDIA by the end of this year, whether or not that will be enough to satisfy demand is a different question entirely.
If the supply satiates the demand, then AMD shouldn't have a problem hitting its price points, meaning that the Radeon HD 3870 would actually be a viable alternative to the 8800 GT. You'd have less performance, but it'd be met with a lower price.
Now if AMD can't hit its price points, then none of this matters, we'll be stuck with two GPUs from two different companies that we can't buy. Great.
The TestFor this test, we are using a high end CPU configured with 4GB of DDR2 in an NVIDIA 680i motherboard. While we are unable to make full use of the 4GB of RAM due to the fact that we're running 32-bit Vista, we will be switching to 64-bit within the next few months for graphics. Before we do so we'll have a final article on how performance stacks up between the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Vista, as well as a final look at Windows XP performance.
Our test platform for this article is as follows:
| Test Setup | |
| CPU | Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 |
| Motherboard | NVIDIA 680i SLI ASUS P5K-E (CrossFire) |
| Video Cards | AMD Radeon HD 3870 AMD Radeon HD 3850 AMD Radeon HD 2900 XT AMD Radeon X1950 XTX NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GT |
| Video Drivers | AMD: Catalyst 7.10 NVIDIA: 169.01 |
| Hard Drive | Seagate 7200.9 300GB 8MB 7200RPM |
| RAM | 4x1GB Corsair XMS2 PC2-6400 4-4-4-12 |
| Operating System | Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit |
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Locut0s - Thursday, November 15, 2007 - link
1) Only Vista was used, though XP has a lot larger user base.You answered your own question there. Remember this card is aimed at the midrange not the enthusiast and even more of these consumers are using XP.
2) Limited variety of games.
The games covered though are all the important big names that actually stress these cards and show what they are made of.
3) Limited variation of AF/AA
See Anand's reply above
4) No UVD tests.
You can see previous reviews to see UVD performance. I doubt this has changed at all since the hardware is identical.
NullSubroutine - Thursday, November 15, 2007 - link
I was saying XP should have been benchmarked because it is the largest userbase and most people especially at this price range will be using XP.When you limit the number of games benchmark you do not show an accurate performance of a video card, it has been shown that certain games play better on certain cards. Some sites only do reviews with games that are biased towards a certain brand or GPU; I expect that Anandtech is not one of those sites and expect a variety of games that show the true performance of the cards.
Locut0s - Thursday, November 15, 2007 - link
Sorry misread your question about XP/Vista. Yes they could test on XP. However it has been shown that the performance difference between the two is fairly small now and is in XPs favour meaning that games should run as good or better than what they show here.NullSubroutine - Thursday, November 15, 2007 - link
I would have to disagree. There was at least a 20 to 25 percent difference in XP very high settings vs Visa very high settings in Crysis. If you look at any number of games, there is still a deficit for performance betwen XP and Vista, while the gap is shrinking, it is still very pronounced.Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, November 15, 2007 - link
I think the real solution to the XP/Vista issue is to do a separate article looking at driver performance in XP vs. Vista. Derek was working on such a beast before the 8800 GT launched, and as far as I remember he found that with the latest driver releases that there's finally performance parity between the OSes (and between 32-bit/64-bit versions of Vista as well, interestingly enough).As far as more titles go, we tried to focus on the big game releases that people were more likely upgrading their hardware for. Time is always limited with these things, but do you have any specific requests for games you'd like to see included? As long as they aren't overly CPU limited we can always look at including them.
I'll have to confirm with Derek, but I believe UVD performance hasn't changed since our last look at UVD with these GPUs: http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=3047">http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=3047.
Thanks for the suggestions, I aim to please so keep it coming :)
Take care,
Anand
NullSubroutine - Friday, November 16, 2007 - link
The biggest discreptency (spelling) I have seen between all reviews have been the drivers used (especially if you take in consideration the difference from say XP to Vista 64 bit new to old drivers).Many review sites are using drivers that came with the disks, 8.43 or 8.44 which are supposed to be out Nov 15th for download (I couldnt find them on AMD's site earlier today). There seems to be these new drivers (must be beta drivers) give a huge boost in performance (it seems) for the 3800 series.
What I cannot figure out why they test the 3800 series with the 8.43/8.44 but the 2900s with 7.10. So its hard to tell if the newer drivers are good for the HD series in general or more specific to the 3800s.
Has Anand tested the different drivers?
Lonyo - Thursday, November 15, 2007 - link
They can't really test in XP that easily.Either they test in Vista, or they test in Vista AND XP (to be able to run DX10 benchmarks).
I expect it's just easier to do all the tests in one OS, rather than having half run in Windows XP, except for DX10 which they run in Vista.
MGSsancho - Thursday, November 15, 2007 - link
I agree with you on that. I think there will be another UVD article later. like nothing but what video cards can offload parts of the video decode, what minimial cpu is needed for like a HTPC to run HD movies.Xp would be cool.
but Anand, could you do a 32b v 64b? i know you mentioned it in the article, but can you do 1gb, 2gb, 4gb, and 8gb configs? maybe current games with single core (AMD 57FX the old king), with a dual core then a quad core? i bring up 8gb for a reason. now aday we can get 2gb dimms. And some of us us our comps for other task like running a few virtual mahchines minimized. we minimize our work, game for a 30 min break then go back to work. or maybe were running apache for a home website. or many other task that simply eat up ram (leaving FF open for weeks}.
Im not asking for a dual socket god machine. but with current mobos, its possible to do 8gb of ram. thanks for reading this and take care.
Locut0s - Thursday, November 15, 2007 - link
With all the buzz in the CPU world nowadays being about more cores and not more MHZ it's interesting to see that the latest graphics cards have been all about more MHZ and more features. It seems to me that it's in the graphics card world that more cores would make the most sense given the almost infinite scalability of rendering. Instead of making the next generation of GPUs more and more complex than the previous generation why not work instead on making these GPUs work together better. Then your next generation card could just be 4 or 5 of the current generation GPUs on the same die or card. Think of it, if they can get the scaling and drivers down pat then you could churn out blazingly fast cards just by adding more cores to the card. And as long as you are manufacturing the same generation chip and doing so at HUGE volumes the cost per chip should go down too.Think this is something we will start to see soon?
Gholam - Thursday, November 15, 2007 - link
In case you haven't noticed, graphics cards have been packing cores by the dozens from the beginning - and lately, by the hundreds.