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
Alexstarfire - Tuesday, July 15, 2008 - link
I've become curious as this is like the 4-5th comment I've come across that talks about a 2GB model and a 1GB model. What I'm curious is whether or not you are talking about a 2x2GB model, to make 4GB across 2 cards, or just 2GB in total RAM, because the one on this site has 2GB of RAM total 2x1GB, 4GB across 2 cards.I have a feeling many are just getting confused, but I'd like to sk to make sure.
Lakku - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
AMD, you fail! Without even reading the whole article, which I will finish in a sec, that board layout already has me in a tizzy. Are you really going to point the PCI-E 8 and 6 pint connectors facing that way? Maybe because it's so long, but I am not sure I like that idea of having a stiff cable (most PS's these days have sleeved cables) having to be routed that way. Then again, I am flying off half-cocked right now, so (if you live around Austin, TX and listen to 93.7 12 to 1, you'll know I am part of Snatch... so this may just all backfire in my face after I get done reading the article).Lerianis - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
Yeah, I have to agree that is a stupid way to point the connectors..... DOWN? They should be pointed towards the wall of the computer, not the bottom of the computer, in order to take into account that most people have a card or three UNDERNEATH those video cards.toyota - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
I didnt read through the whole article but why did Anandtech end up with a 1024mb version when EVERYBODY else is getting 2048mb versions? heck even all the ATI slides showed 2048mb for the R700.http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews.php?reviewid=5...">http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews.php?reviewid=5...
http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTU...">http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTU...
http://techreport.com/articles.x/15105">http://techreport.com/articles.x/15105
orionmgomg - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
I was wondering the exact same thing.Maybe they are going to release even better results with the 2GB version and blow away Nvida!?
I am a Nvidia Fan Boy - or should I say - who ever gots the biggest guns Fan Boy, so if ATI brings in the meat and potatos, Ill eat em all up.
PS: I have an ASUS X38 DDR3 with QX9650 & 2 Gigs DDR3 1600 7-7-7-20, and I have been running just 1 EVGA 8800 Ultra Because SLI is not supported with this mobo, so when I upgraded from the 680i I sold my other Ultra...
But!!!!!!!! This MOBO HAS CrossFIRE!!!
As almost all other X38/X48 Mobos do! And I have been waiting for a Cross Fire solution that was worthy. If I could just get 2 of the 4870x2 cards in my system for Quad GPU - that would be really nice - give my Dorkfielf 4.0 something to do. LOL
PS; Also need to upgrade to Vista 64 as a 32 bit OS would not like 4 gigabytes of ram on the video cards, and with 2GBs system memory - may be a problem - plus upgrade ro 4 GBs of course...
csiszarerik - Tuesday, July 15, 2008 - link
Hm, reply on your PS: try to install service pack 1 for Vista... my 4 gigs are there... before it was only 3.3 gigs... i have read somewhere that the new core in SP1 supports higher ram amounts...imaheadcase - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
Ram on video card means Jack Squat in all but a few games out, even then its not noticeable. A 512meg vs 2gig card means no performance difference if 2 equal cards.Lerianis - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
It doesn't? That's funny: every single testing place I have seen says that when you have a lot of memory on the card to hold textures and other things, it does help with performance a lot, since they don't have to page things to the hard drive or pull things from the hard drive as often.Alexstarfire - Tuesday, July 15, 2008 - link
That's if, AND ONLY IF, all the stuff doesn't already fit onto the cards memory. Most of the time you'll run the FPS into the ground before that happens, negating any performance gain you may possibly get. If, however, you happen to find a game where the FPS remains high, like in GRID, then it will help. Course, you'd need quite a big monitor to get a resolution that high, but that's beside the point.gigahertz20 - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
AMD needs to get on the ball with their drivers, they still don't even have the 4850 and 4870 listed on their site under video card drivers.http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html">http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html
Seems like all their effort was put into just releasing the hardware to sell and make money, and not putting as much time into perfecting the drivers as they should be.