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AMD's Dual GPU Monster, The Radeon HD 3870 X2
MojoKid writes "AMD officially launched their new high-end flagship graphics card today and
this one has a pair of graphics processors on a single PCB.
The Radeon HD 3870 X2 was codenamed R680 throughout its development.
Although that codename implies the card is powered by a new GPU, it is not. The
Radeon HD 3870 X2 is instead powered by a pair of RV670 GPUs linked together on
a single PCB by a PCI Express fan-out switch. In essence, the Radeon HD 3870 X2
is "CrossFire on a card" but with a small boost in clock speed for each GPU as
well.
As the benchmarks and testing show, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 is one of the
fastest single cards around right now. NVIDIA is rumored to be readying a dual
GPU single card beast as well."
No mention from the article summary of whether this is supported by ATI's recent decision to release driver source code. If you buy this card can you use it with free software?
(Extra points if anyone pedantically takes the subject line and suggests targetting gcc to run the Linux kernel on your GPU... but you know what I mean...)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
It's time to change my aging Athlon 900 MHz then :-).
Can't make it faster? Make more. Another multiprocessing application. Can I haz multiprocessor network card plz?
When can I have a quantum graphics card that displays all possible pictures at the same time ?
Misleading titles? Inflammatory blurbs? Keep in mind that Slashdot is a tabloid.
I hope I don't need a dual PSU unit too.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
You can't put two of these in Crossfire yet. ATI is working on Crossfire X drivers that will allow you to put two 3870x2s in crossfire.
Two GPUs on a single card? Who the hell needs that kind of power? Besides, don't modern graphics cards waste ridiculous amounts of energy even when they're simply drawing your desktop?
For those who haven't been following the recent releases of ATI graphics cards, it's probably interesting to note that the AI HD2850 and HD2870 use only 20 Watt when idling (most low-end cards use at least 30W nowadays, and high-end cards are often closer to 100W).
So that should mean that this new card should eat about 40W when idling, making this card not just the most powerful graphics card today, but also less wasteful than nVidia's 8800GT. Not a bad choice if you're in dire need of more graphics power. Although personally I'm planning to buy a simple 3850.
Wait for the nVidia version. Based on their latest offerings, it'll probably be faster and have more stable drivers.
http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3209 Anandtech's article compares the 3870x2 against 8800 GT SLI (a good comparison since they cost almost exactly the same). 8800 GT SLI wins in almost every case. 3870x2 is still a damn good card for people with only one PCIe x16 slot though.
Graphic cards have long since been really fast for 99.9999% of cases. Even gaming. These companies must be doing this for pissing contests, the few people who do super high end graphics work, or a few crazy pimply faced gamers with monitor tans
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I am really not that impressed. It's not much faster than the 8800 GT which is MUCH MUCH MUCH less expensive. I am sure you can pick up two 8800 GT's for the price of this card. Of course then you have to deal with the noise, but overall it looks to me that the price/performance ratio of this card is not that great.
This card is actually the most power-hungry of the lot.
They only give power consumption for the whole system, 214W when idle, 374W when under load (!)
SOme basic math on their results gives you the 3870 consumes 50W when idle, and the X2 consuming 100W when idle and up to a massive 260W when under full load.
(3870 at idle = 164W, 3870 X2 at idle = 214W, hence 3870 = 50W)
No matter how well they designed the card, at the end of the day price/performance is what you are looking for in a graphics card. This card delivers performance that teeters around the same performance that the 8800 Ultra gives at a much lower cost and produces about the same noise and power ratios.
ATI announced that they won't sell cards for over 500 dollars and I think that gives them a good standing in the market place. If you are willing to spend 450 dollars http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814103052 and want to upgrade in the future, then this is probably going to be best buy. I think that speaks well for ATI who hasn't even been near the market for a while.
That being said, I think if you are going to buy a video card and can wait for Nvidia's product (which is supposed to be in Feb) then I would definitely do that to see what competition they will bring.
You must be mis-pronouncing it - it's R-Upside-Down-Nine-Vertical-Infinity-Circle. That's how the engineers all refer to it internally.
Pretty cool if you ask me.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I haven't heard anything about any specs for 3d operations being released from AMD. I know they were talking about it, but what happened then? Did they release anything while I wasn't looking?
Installed the Bubblemon yet?
Not really. This codename was created in remembrance of those that gave their lives in the 'Crossfire' Revolution of 680AD, where the French (or the Gauls as they were known back then) ambushed the Germans with their Black Widow catapults, from opposite sides of a treacherous ravene, and accidentally killed each other in the process. WTF are you expecting from a codename? o_0
which is totally what she said
The summary failed to mention the most important factor: the new AMD card is actually much cheaper than the 8800 Ultra and at the same time a lot faster in many tests. In addition, it seems that the X2 equivalent of nVidia is delayed by one month or more, so AMD does have the lead for at least another month.
Full Tilt
AMD/ATI still has issues delivering drivers on par with nVidia, depending on the application.
But, yes it does run Linux.
Interesting thing is what happens when you stop looking at synthetic benchmarks... and start looking at real gameplay.
:)
Take a read through hardocp's review for an example.
As to why AMD released? Well, my understanding is that NVidia is looking to release thier own 2-GPU card (9800 GX2) in Feb/March. Given the benchmarks of the current cards, I can't see the 3870 X2 holding up well... so... beat 'em to market. Although when you factor price in, I'd imagine it'll still be competitive; just not anywhere near the fastest.
What I'm waiting to see come out from AMD is the R700 cards... especially if it convinces nvidia to finally release thier true next-gen cards as well (not merely the continued tweaking/shrinking of the G80 architecture). Then we can all have something to look forward to
My 8800 Ultra still beats this thing hands down, and I could put another one in SLI for way less than buying one of these ATI cards... And for all those that say why do you need this? You don't NEED it any more than you need a 4X4 SUV when you only drive in the city... or $200 basketball sneakers to walk down the street. I buy it because I want it.
Nice. I get modded down to -1 for legitimately asking if you'll be able to run a 4 core setup using two of these cards. Way to go guys!
This guy's the limit!
Anyone remember the ATI Rage Fury MAXX? I've still got one in use. It was a monster in its day. Dual Rage 128 Pro GPU's and 64MB of RAM. But for some reason the way that they jury rigged them on one board didn't work properly in XP, so it only uses one. Oh well, still s nifty conversation piece.
If you pay your taxes you support terrorism!
Why only pci-e 1.1 a 2.0 switch would better split the bus to the 2 gpus.
also there should be 2 cross fire slots as each gps has 2 links and 2 out of 4 are used to link each other.
The reason for the existence of your universe is to not be rendered on someone's computer game. Thanks for playing but your universe will not be needed.
How fast will these be if you run them in Crossfire mode? If you can use one card on 16x with two chips on it, each one gets 8x PCIe (or eight lanes). Put two cards in the same system and each card gets 8x - the equivalent of 4 lanes per core on most motherboards.
Sounds like you have to replace your new motherboard if you want to get the potential out of the cards.
They only compared the card to the 8800 GT and GTX from NVIDIA's selection of cards.
What i really want to know is how much power does it have against NVIDIA's top card the 8800 Ultra. I read the article and i think i didn't even spot a single mention of the Ultra being tested along side all the other cards. So, did they run out of budget or something?
na the trick with these cards are that you can crossfire 2 of those (4 GPUs anyone)
WulframII - Free Online Mutiplayer 3D Tank Shooting Game
Just take two of your cards that are getting beaten by NVIDIA and then combine them in the hopes that they'll beat NVIDIA! aaaaand go!
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
There are plenty of motherboards out there that can drive two PCIe x16 slots. Only mediocre boards will downgrade the second slot to x8 when a second card goes in.
You admitted that you didn't even RTFA before asking, your question is covered in TFA, and you said you were about to read it. Kinda like asking a mechanic how much oil your car takes while you start to open the car's manual.
Work is in the pipeline for a board which can house all your computer's necessary components, including a multiple core CPU that can handle graphics AND processing all-in-one! It will be the mother of all boards.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
whatever happened to the physics card that some company released a while back? It seemed like a pretty good idea, and I wonder if it could be modified to fit onto a graphics card as well. I just think that would be a nice coupling because I like the small towers rather than the huge behemoth that I have in my Mom's basement (no, I don't live at home any more, wanna take my geek card back?). It's nice that they are putting an extra chip into their cards, I can definitely imagineer that as being pretty helpful, especially with buffery stuff, but it seems that the physics processing unit (ppu) would be an even more handy addition since I can't think of many things you would do that require a powerful gpu that couldn't also make use of some nice ppu functions. Maybe if it were designed really well, the ppu could even workhorse as a secondary gpu for those applications that I can't think of. Although, I certainly have no concrete evidence for this, nor reason to believe that what I'm saying makes any sense to anyone who does know about these things, I still think it seems like a more "revolutionary" step than this.
In the 7th Century what we know as France today, along with the low countries and some of western Germany, was known as Francia and was ruled, at least in theory, by the Merovingian line of Frankish kings. This century saw the rise of the Carolingian dynasty within Francia, which reached their height in the late 8th and early 9th Centuries with the reign of Charlemagne.
Germany wasn't a single political entity until the 19th Century, and the Franks were Germanic, which is more of a group of identities, but as close as your going to get at this point in time.
Francia would form the basis of the Carolingian Empire, which would itself lead on to the establishment of the Holy Roman Empire, one of the most important political entities in Western Christendom throughout the High Middle Ages, when it was more usually thought of as a continuation of the Roman Empire in the West, even though it was nothing of the kind.
I did appreciate the joke, and I'm not being a pedant or anything. I just thought I'd share with you some of the history of the time. After the Volkerwanderungzeit, but before the second wave of barbarian invasions, this is a crucial period in the early formation of Europe.
How dare you be so modest!! You conceited bastard!!
I keep repeating this: Buy vendors that do offer open source drivers.
Typical Reply: Boo hoo, Intel is too slow, boo hoo.
My reply: Intel's graphic cards won't get faster if no one buys them. Other companies won't open source their drivers if you keep buying them with closed source drivers. Other companies will only open their drivers if they see it works for Intel.
Newegg has a category for them [the "AGEIA PhysX Card"]:
So we have come full circle to the Voodoo 5 then?
Many things you are wrong with there. The first is framerate. If you can't tell the difference between 24 and 60 FPS, well you probably have something wrong. It is pretty obvious on computer graphics due to the lack of motion blur present in film, and even on a film/video source you can see it. 24 FPS is not the maximum amount of frames a person can perceive, rather it is just an acceptable amount when used with film.
So one goal in graphics is to be able to push a consistently high frame rate, probably somewhere in the 75fps range as that is the area when people stop being able to perceive flicker. However, while the final output frequency will be fixed to something like that due to how display devices work, it would be useful to have a card that could render much faster. What you'd do is have the card render multiple sub frames and combine them in an accumulation buffer before outputting them to screen. That would give nice, accurate, motion blur and thus improve the fluidity of the image. So in reality we might want a card that can consistently render a few hundred frames per second, even though it doesn't display that many.
There's also latency to consider. If you are rendering at 24fps that means you have a little over 40 milliseconds between frames. So if you see something happen on the screen and react, the computer won't get around to displaying the results of your reaction for 40 msec. Maybe that doesn't sound like a long time, but that has gone past the threshold where delays are perceptible. You notice when something is delayed that long.
In terms of resolution, it is a similar thing. 1920x1200 is nice and all, and is about as high as monitors go these days, but let's not pretend it is all that high rez. For a 24" monitor (which is what you generally get it on) that works out to about 100PPI. Well print media is generally 300DPI or more, so we are still a long way off there. I don't know how high rez monitors need to be numbers wise, but they need to be a lot higher to reach the point of a person not being able to perceive the individual pixels which is the useful limit.
Also pixel oversampling is useful just like frame oversampling. You render multiple subpixels and combine them in to a single final display pixel. It is called anti-aliasing and it is very desirable. Unfortunately, it does take more power to do since you do have to do more rendering work, even when you use tricks to do it (and it really looks the best when does as straight super-sampling, no tricks).
So it isn't just gamers playing the ePenis game, there's real reasons to want a whole lot more graphics power. Until we have displays that are so high rez you can't see individual pixels, and we have cards that can produce high frame rates at full resolution with motion blur and FSAA, well then we haven't gotten to where we need to be. Until you can't tell it apart form reality, there's still room for improvement.
Their next vid card will prolly require you to buy a diesel-powered Lincoln Arc Welder just to feed enough current to supply the GPU chips.
Six month old card, no working driver. ...and by that I mean a driver which doesn't say "Card not supported" when you try to install it.
This month they released an unsupported "hotfix driver" which installs but puts garbage on screen when you try anything - even with obvious things like 3DMark.
No sig today...
So when my level 58 Troll gets gang-ganked outside the gates of the Dark Portal by a pack of teamspeak-using 12 year olds, I'll be able to see him melt in the full techno-color the author envisioned. Sweet.
They should just rename them selves to DAMMIT already. Props to the person who thought of it originally.
That is only the case on lower-end CrossFire boards. The better ones not only have two full x16 slots but they are PCIe v2.0 and have 8 MB/sec full duplex. So a 3870 X2 on a new 790FX board allows each GPU the 4 MB/sec bandwidth that a single PCIe v.1 x16 slot provides.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
That's still 256 bit memory; if (when?) nVidia releases a dual GPU with the 8800 series, ATI will get beaten for sure. And I'm not saying this because I own an nVidia videocard; the tests just made it obvious.
"The body may heal, but the mind is not always so resilient." -- Deus Ex: Human Revolution
So if this is Crossfire on one Board doesn't that fact limit the maximum number of crossfire cards in one board even more?
I mean you can have the same power with 2 crossfire cards containing the same gpu chip, but how about even multiplying the power of those.
That might not be of any practical interest for most of you (at least not for me since I could never afford to buy those and don't have any idea of a practical use).
But can you still connect the same number of cards as with the single gpu models?
Two times crap is just a bigger pile of crap. The fact that this card only occasionally outpaces the 15-month-old 8800GTX is just pathetic. Sad and pathetic.
Take the same money, buy a pair of cheap 8800GT's and you'll cream this ATI blunder.
When it comes to graphics, I'm all about rooting for the winner. I've jumped from one company to the other many times over the last decade, but ATI has been all thumbs for the last little while. They finally cleaned up their drivers but that only highlighted the fact that the hardware still sucks. Just like AMD's Phenom, it's a big boring release over a year too late. There's nothing to be proud about when your flagship product falls in the "budget" category before it's even released.
Wake me when the Geforce 9 hits, or the Radeon 5xxx (yeah, skip the 4xxx range) - until then it's going to be a dull ride.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Now I can play Crisis with Medium settings
Technology Forum
"Actually, rendering 3D graphics is about the most boring thing that this generation of cards does."
Oh I wouldn't say that.
It's not worth a damn unless you can use it in a quad-gpu setup (2 of these in a crossfire configuration)