Just a quick Q, how the funk does 2x 4870s in crossfire get over double the FPS of one 4870 on the COD4 benchmarks??? surely crossfire introduces a slight bottleneck due to the communication between cards?
Communication between chips has been improved since 3870x2. The new bridge chip would appear to eliminate any bottleneck
Yeah I wondered the same thing and came to the conclusion it is the drivers. So the 4870 results where done with the press-driver available at that time. The Crossfire test was done with newer 8.7 drivers and the X2 again had a new driver. ATI has been working extremely hard on COD4 lately, and it is exactly that game that shows it. CF scaling is amazing in this game. But it seems that the final 8.7 driver offers slightly better COD4 overall performance.
I hope those rumous about GT300 are true if Nvidia wants to beat that card... Wow that thing is fast!
Pretty nice numbers. I wonder if a 4GB model would ever come out. It seems like a bit overkill to me... and is gonna be bloody expensive. However, the geek in me is screaming with utter joyfulness at the thought :banana: Nice photos as well. The upgrade to 450D was worth it
Great article, as usual Well the performance offered by this card is just and well the drivers should improve in time, plus its a engineering sample..and it performs like this..fantastic!
interesting. I want to see if nvidia will release a gx2 product. Then we can really get a fair comparison.
the 4870 512MB DDR5 costs around 289.99$ to 300$ and again thats for a 512MB card only. Now think about a 2GB DDR5 is gonna be expensive to manufacture, id say roughly around 650-800$.
the 4870 was never meant to be a super high end offering. AMD are concentrating on the midrange bang for buck option. I think it would be interesting to compare the 4870X2 to say an nvidia 260GX2 but it would not be a fair comparison with a 280GX2 as the 4870 is not competing against it for the performance crown. However some of the results from the 4870X2 suggest it could have the beating of SLI 280's in certain situations...so comparisons are inevitable really...
ATI definently has an excellent product here with the 4870x2. Price/performance wise it clearly takes the crown and to 99% of the people that is all that matters. I'm very happy the competition is back and we the consumers will finally be getting some better products for lower prices. Yet I still have to add OF COURSE the 4870x2 beats the GTX 280; it is two processors with a massive amount of stream processors clocked high with GDDR5! Seems like a no brainer to me. I don't know the timelines for these reviews and other contraints, but for the AMD card that has brought them back into all levels of the market I had expected a more thorough review; although it was a good and I am thankful to see its performance in general. I'm curious if there is going to be a comparison of the 9800GTX+, 260, 280, GX2 against the 4850, 4870 and 4870x2. And then there should be an SLI/ Crossfire review. I'm thinking AMD is going to take this.
is the 256-bit Memory interface of ATi's card creating the laginess and stuttering in the games as Hilbert pinpointed in the review?? :3eyes:
