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 |
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
55 Comments
View All Comments
Grantman - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
Very interesting to see the 8800gt sli outperforming the gtx 280 in two of the game tests. They can be had so cheap so I'm alwayes interested in info on them. Also pleased to see Oblivion as a test. The 4870x2 will has potential but as you said it really depends on the driver department. If ATI could come out with some solid reliable and fast drivers the 4870x2 should take off.JonnyDough - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
THANK YOU FOR INCLUDING OBLIVION! I think that this graphic heavy title does NOT get enough attention sometimes! Sure it's not as new, but it still doesn't run at high FPS with everything on high at a high resolution! Keep including it!B3an - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
Will there be a 2GB version of this card???Because i've no idea how Derek gets these frame rates at 2560x1600 with only 512MB usable VRAM. I guess once again they are using a special magical version that magically fits all those textures PLUS AA into 512MB @ 2560x1600 res.
From looking at dodgy charts like this before i got a 9800GX2 and that was a joke for this res, always running into the memory limit, where your'd then go into the realm of the slide show. It wasn't just me btw, every other owner of the GX2 with a 30" monitor i spoke to had this problem. As for GRID that wasn't even anywhere near playable with 2xAA, let alone 4 times @ 2560x1600 - again the memory limit. Yet anand and some other sites have these magical versions....
Alexstarfire - Tuesday, July 15, 2008 - link
It's a 2x1GB card, what are you babbling on about?ViRGE - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
"Today's article is merely a preview as R700s won't be officially launched for at least another month, but AMD wanted to unveil a bit of what it's cooking."This is starting to drift back in to paper launch territory, which makes me uneasy. It strikes me that allowing early previews is just as much about sinking the GTX 280 as it is showcasing a new product, which leads to the same kind of problems that we've seen in the past with paper launchers. While I love AT's CPU previews, those are both several months in advance and are for a product with a longer shelf life; I'm not sure GPU previews are necessarily as fair.
I really don't want to see this becoming a habit, with companies previewing products early enough that it's always untenable to buy something because there's something better just around the corner (except that we don't know how far).
hooflung - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
Meh, Nvidia's been doing it to AMD for the past 18 months. Time for some payback.toonces - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
Like the 9800GTX+ preview done 3 weeks ago coinciding with AMD's 4850 launch?I don't really have a problem with previews like this as long as AnandTech and the manufacturer can guarantee the GPU/CPU/PSU/WhateverU will be released in reasonable quantity in a reasonable amount of time.
As long as AMD/NV can avoid another 7900GTX 512MB or X800XT PE paper launch debacle they should be given the benefit of the doubt, for now, IMHO.
ira176 - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
Wonder when AMD will design dual core gpu with on chip memory controller. That should help significantly shorten the card.n7 - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
The huge gain in GRID would be due to the extra vRAM, as it chokes with only 512 MB.I am having a hard time believing AT is the only review site to get a 2x512 MB version instead of 2x1 GB.
toyota - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
I have seen 4 so far plus all the individuals that have personal cards now and they have ALL been 2gb models. like I said earlier ATI doesnt even have a 4870 X2 1gb model in their slides.