ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 - R700 Preview: AMD's Fastest Single Card
by Derek Wilson on July 14, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Picking The Games
AMD did have some stipulations for our R700 preview, they were as follows:
1. Previews can be posted any time after 12:01 am on Monday, July 14th.
2. Previews can include benchmarks of any combination of artificial tests or games up to a maximum of four.
3. As PowerPlay has not been enabled in the BIOS on your engineering sample, please stay away from Idle Power tests at this point.
4. In the interest of leaving something for the full NDA lift in August, we'd ask you to keep this high level and not go deep on the architecture at this point.
Today is Monday, July 14th, so we met the first requirement. AMD didn't give us much detail on the architecture, so check there as well. PowerPlay hasn't been enabled but it will in the final card, fair enough, we will only test load power. The second point was the tricky one though - AMD only wanted us to test four games, although it was up to us to choose which ones.
Of course, we did take the opportunity to do some internal testing in order to find out what tests were the best to present. For the most part (yes there are exceptions) the R700 performed similarly to what we would expect from 4870 in CrossFire. Therefore, we would refer our readers to our RV770 review for a general idea of what to expect from R700 in the worst case.
AMD has said that they are still improving CrossFire support and performance for many games and this preview driver doesn't necessarily reflect the performance we will see at launch in all games. This puts us in a bit of a tight spot, as reporting numbers for the games that currently don't benefit (or don't benefit much) from R700 over 4870 could be attributed to the prerelease driver. This very fact limits our ability to fairly report on the potential downside of R700.
In light of that, to make the best of this limited preview, we feel that we both have to report on games that do benefit from CrossFire and underline the fact that there are games out there that do not benefit or that do not benefit significantly from CrossFire (or SLI or multiGPU in general). At launch, we will try to do a much better job of representing the potential downside: we are currently asking our readers and our forum members for feedback on what games they play or know of that do not benefit from multiGPU so that we can take a look at them and help fairly represent the downside of any multiGPU solution. Please help us out if you have the information or the time to do so.
Looking at games that benefit from CrossFire or that benefit differently with R700 than a multi-card solution, we decided that it wouldn't be any fun just to show what we've seen over and over in our reviews. We can't avoid Crysis, so that will be included. Oblivion has been a good standby that can still bring cards to their knees at the highest settings. But before we had even contemplated this preview we've been looking at adding a couple new games to our test suite.
We always get requests for MMOs, and Age of Conan is the new hotness. Even though the DX10 version isn't out in the wild yet, we developed a repeatable benchmark for this game and will be using it in this preview. Additionally, flying and racing games are often requested. We won't be adding flight sim in this round, but Race Driver GRID is an incredibly beautiful game that we are happy to add to our test suite.
Again, as we mentioned, R700 does perform similarly to CrossFire, so looking at past 4870 CrossFire results is a fair indication of performance.
The Test
Most of our numbers come from our recent RV770 review. For the new games we've added, we used the latest drivers available for all the cards. The beta drivers we have for R700 were used for all AMD parts in Age of Conan and Race Driver GRID.
| Test Setup | |
| CPU | Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770 @ 3.20GHz |
| Motherboard | EVGA nForce 790i SLI Intel DX48BT2 |
| Video Cards | ATI Radeon HD 4850 ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 ATI Radeon HD 3870 EVGA GeForce 9800 GTX KO NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+ NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 |
| Video Drivers | Catalyst Press Driver (8.7 beta) Catalyst 8.5 ForceWare 177.34 (for GT200) ForceWare 177.39 (for 9800 GTX/9800 GTX+) ForceWare 175.16 (everything else) |
| Hard Drive | Seagate 7200.9 120GB 8MB 7200RPM |
| RAM | 4 x 1GB Corsair DDR3-1333 7-7-7-20 |
| Operating System | Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit SP1 |
| PSU | PC Power & Cooling Turbo Cool 1200W |
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ZootyGray - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
I look forward to Anandtech testing. Other sites - some good, some biased, some illiterate, etc.I describe Anandtech testing as thorough, fearless, accurate, brutal, relentless, and uncompromising. And few typos/language issues. And this results in far fewer fanboy/junk comments as well.
If I want the real truth, I come here, and I read it slowly - it's like a feast.
Thanks Anand and company.
jamesbond007 - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
On page 7:It is likely that the extra 512MB of RAM available to each GPU has significantly impacted perforamnce since we are testing with all the options cranked up and 4xAA.
Anyways, I can't wait to see tests with 2x 4780X2 going! I also would have liked to see the 4780 (single) in all of the tests, but I figured the card would get roughly half of the performance of the new X2. No big deal.
The power consumption diagrams are making me realize why the 1000W+ PSUs exist. :) Good gravy, boy! A guy would have to pick up an extra shift or job just to pay the electric bill for the new cards coming out these days. Then again, most guys who buy this card likely live in their parent's basement. :p
Just joking, of course!
Game on, ATi! Nicely done.
~Travis
hooflung - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
This can't be a 1G version Derek. This has to be the 2G version everyone else has gotten. Can you confirm that?Nvidia... meet face. Age of Conan on this card is simply amazing. I think I'll trade in my 3850 512 for the X2 once it comes out. Something I said I wouldn't do for a while.
yacoub - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
Kind of annoying you didn't include the ATI Radeon HD 4870 card in every test, as that's the most expensive one most people will care about. The $500+ stuff is ridiculous. The $299 card is a bit more worth reading about.The other thing is how you have to test at 2560x now just to show the biggest differences. Kinda shows that something like an 8800GT is still fine for 1680x and even 1920x for most games.
7Enigma - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
Let's see this is a preview about AMD's new high-end card that will directly compete with the 280. Of course most of us will never buy it, it doesn't mean it isn't important. There is already a review about the $300 card, it came out already with an indepth review.Every comparison has a nice graph and chart at the bottom showing performance at several different resolutions. If you are too lazy to THINK instead of just looking at the pretty color bars and seeing which one is longer, that's on you.
Really these complaints are just getting rediculous. If they failed to review the cheaper cards or only showed a single resolution/setting (cough...cough..(H)) then I could see your point. Fact of the matter is people shelling out >$500 for a graphics card probably DO have the screens with the resolutions in the bar graphs.
Alexstarfire - Tuesday, July 15, 2008 - link
No offense to you, but it would seem to me that they were just a bit lazy on making the extra lines in the graph. I know that at Guru3D that they include different resolutions in the graphs.To me, it's not that I'm lazy, but it's a lot more difficult to compare different numbers across a range of cards and settings than it is to see which one is above and/or below others on a graph.
FXi - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
Put 2x 4870x2's in CF on an Intel X48 or X58 and you can kiss BOTH Nvidia's chipsets AND GPU's goodbye.Advantages:
Crossfire is fully supported on Intel chipsets with NO bridge chip required.
Crossfire won't be denied to function on Intel chipsets - the current bridge chip on Skulltrail has had 280 SLI denied by Nvidia, because they don't "feel" like enabling it.
Dual screens on Crossfire? No problem. Crossfire doesn't artificially limit dual screen use to just their workstation cards like Quadro.
4870x2 is already managing to beat SLI 280's in some places. Driver improvements will only make it a stronger beating in the future.
Don't you want a company that is committed to working WITH Intel, where it makes sense, rather than fighting them?
Support for DX 10.1 "just in case" it should end up enabled in some games.
Can you possibly imagine what the R800 is going to do? People should be considering the 4870x2 over the 280 and Crossfire of 280 SLI without a doubt. High res gaming has never looked so good.
DigitalFreak - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
Fanboy much?piroroadkill - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
Uh, multiple monitors are really important to a lot of people, I know it is to me, rendering SLI pointlessGriswold - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
So, AMD needs to bring their drivers to the point where all games of the past benefit from multi-GPU? Are you sure we need to play 5-10 years old games (assuming they even run on todays systems) at 5000fps just to prove a point? :P