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
Race Driver GRID Performance
This is by far the most interesting test we have numbers for today.
Here we see at 2560x1600, where all of our multi-GPU solutions struggled to get through the menus and into the game, our 4870 X2 shows a performance increase that illustrates good scaling. 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. It may be possible that the R700 hardware offers tangible advantages over AMD's previous method of performing CrossFire, but we can't know if this could be the case with the memory difference being such a likely culprit here.
It does make sense, on a high end part, to target an audience that will be pushing memory limits as far as possible. While gamers who want a single 4870 might not want to run at 2560x1600, it really doens't make much sense right now to go with a hugely expensive card unless you want that kind of resolution. This does add an advantage for R700 over two card crossfire at the moment (which may or may not go away after the introduction of 1GB 4870 cards).
Beyond that, we do note that in addition to our other added game, GRID shows a clear advantage over GT200 for AMD's latest generation.
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docmilo - Wednesday, July 16, 2008 - link
This hotfix is a new set of drivers for the 4800 series. I installed them last night on my 4850 and when I run the Overdrive I reach 700mhz on the gpu stable.docmilo - Wednesday, July 16, 2008 - link
Well the link didn't work. Here's the address:http://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp?dep...">http://support.ati.com/ics/support/defa...mp;task=...
Lerianis - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
They probably haven't released a new driver for these cards yet and expect you to use the driver they include on the disk with the card. Wait until next month, they will most likely finally have a driver on their website for these cards.alzg22 - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
They do have drivers, Catalyst 8.6 introduced support for the 4800 series. It's just not listed under the driver finder, probably.bob4432 - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
i think they are referring to a driver that changes the fan speed so you don't cook the 4850/4870s....KikassAssassin - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
You can do that now by creating an Overdrive profile in the control center, and editing the profile's file (Documents/username/AppData/Local/ATI/ACE/profilename.xml) in Notepad. There's a line in there for fan speed that you can edit. I set mine to 40% (up from the default 20%) and idle temps on my 4870 dropped from about 75C to 45C, and load temps dropped from about 95C to about 65C. 40% fan speed was right about at the upper limit I could set it to before the fan noise became annoying (the thing seriously sounds like a freaking jet engine at max speed).It'd be nice if they'd add an option to change the fan speed in the control center, though.
sc3252 - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
This card is hot for a $500 video card. I cant wait to pick one up. Two questions I have. Does it actually share the memory or is it separate? Did they fix the stutter associated with Crossfire?DerekWilson - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
oh yeah, and we're going to wait until the card actually comes out to look at things like micro-stutter etc...DerekWilson - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
memory is not shared. shared framebuffer won't come out for a while yet apparently ...each GPU has a separate 512MB framebuffer.
LeftSide - Monday, July 14, 2008 - link
Hardopc is saying their card has 2gigs, 1gig per core. Are there 2 versions of this card?