AMD's Radeon HD 4870 X2 - Testing the Multi-GPU Waters
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on August 12, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
General Performance at 2560x1600
We've already established that in games with CrossFire support, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is the grand poobah of gaming performance. Along with such a title comes a general requirement: if you're dropping over $500 on a graphics card on a somewhat regular basis, you had better have a good monitor - one of many 30" displays comes to mind. Without a monitor that can handle 2560x1600, especially with 2x 4870 X2 cards in CrossFire, all that hard earned money spent on graphics hardware is just wasted.
Since the target resolution here is 2560 x 1600, let's see how the 4870 X2 stacks up in our suite of games at this resolution:
The 4870 X2 holds its own against its major competition from NVIDIA, the GTX 260 SLI, in 4 of our 7 benchmarks, while the 4870 X2 CrossFire leads the pack in all but one game (Assassin's Creed). It is always tough to pick the games we want to test, as the games we pick end up deciding what we think of performance. We try to pick games that are both interesting to the community and/or show interesting performance differences between hardware. In this case, what we have here is a pretty good picture of the general case: the 4870 X2 and GTX 260 SLI are pretty well matched.
Of course, the GTX 260 SLI option is two cards which requires an NVIDIA motherboard. This puts it at a bit of a disadvantage to a single card solution that is platform agnostic. And we also have the fact that at the target resolution of 4870 X2 CrossFire AMD does have the most powerful option that fits into two slots. These are very important factors for AMD, but as we've seen before 4-way solutions aren't the value option (you don't get the same return on your money as you might with other solutions even if you do get high performance).
Taking into account the price drops, we also see the single GPU arena looking very competitive with the GTX 260 and HD 4870 about on par. In these tests, the HD 4870 looks to have an advantage, but again we could add a few more benchmarks and see the GTX 260 do better. This is what we like to see: real competition. Of course, the tough question to answer here is whether or not the GTX 280 is worth 1.5x either the GTX 260 or the 4870.
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pattycake0147 - Tuesday, August 12, 2008 - link
I've noticed the same bias recently. I've only been a member for a little over a year now and even in the short time the site has gone downhill.sweetsauce - Tuesday, August 12, 2008 - link
Translation: I like ATI and you don't so im going to bitch. Even though my name is tech guy, i obviously have ovaries. I'm going to go cry now on ATI's behalf.jnmfox - Tuesday, August 12, 2008 - link
Get over yourself. Pointing out facts isn't taking pot-shots.This is just what I was looking for in a review of the X2. The numbers tell the story. In the majority of cases the X2 isn't worth it, and until AMD & NVIDIA get proper hardware implementation of multi-GPU solutions it will most continue to be the case.
To little performance increase for the large increase is cost.
skiboysteve - Tuesday, August 12, 2008 - link
i completely agree with anand on this article. the lack of innovation from a company supposedly focusing on multi chip solutions is stupidalthough yes, it is really fast.
and why cant they clock it lower at idle?
astrodemoniac - Tuesday, August 12, 2008 - link
... reviews I have ever seen here @ Anands. I am extremely disappointed with this so called "Review" ... hell, I have seen PREVIEWS that would put it to shame.Oh, and what in the hell did AMD do to you that you're so obviously pissed off at them?... are you annoyed they didn't give you preferential treatment to release the review earlier? man just go back to the unbiased reviews, we're buying graphic cards, not brands.
It's like the guys writing the reviews are not gamers any more o_0
/rant
Halley - Wednesday, August 13, 2008 - link
It's no secret that AnandTech is "managed by Intel" as a user put it. Of course every one must have some source of income to support their families and themselves but it's pathetic to show such blatant biasedness.TheDoc9 - Tuesday, August 12, 2008 - link
Anandtech isn't about gaming anymore, it's about photography and home theater. And the occasional newest intel extreem cpu.I think Dailytech and the forums carry Anandtech these days...
DigitalFreak - Tuesday, August 12, 2008 - link
"AMD decided that since there's relatively no performance increase yet there's an increase in power consumption and board costs that it would make more sense to leave the feature disabled. "In other words, it's broken in hardware and we couldn't get it working, so we "disabled" it.
NullSubroutine - Tuesday, August 12, 2008 - link
You didn't even include test system specs or driver versions.CreasianDevaili - Tuesday, August 12, 2008 - link
I wanted to know why you didnt retest the 4870CF setup when you obviously had some issues with it before in GRID. I noticed the 280gtx setup was retested which resulted in higher FPS. I feel that after running the game at 2560x1600 on my FW900 and also from other reviews that you had a issue with crossfire not working at that resolution. The single 4870 shouldnt be getting better FPS by that degree at 2560x1600 because it also has 512mb of vram.So I just wanted to know why the 280gtx was special enough to retest when this review was about the 4870X2. If it is to show a good comparison then why wasnt the 4870CF, which many have and want to see, not retested as well.