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An Early Peek At AMD's Radeon HD 4870 X2
Dr. Damage writes "AMD has quite a hit in the Radeon HD 4000 series. Coming up next is a product code-named R700, a high-end graphics card based on two 4870s paired together. TechReport has a preliminary look at how the card — to be called the Radeon HD 4870 X2 — performs. Nvidia could have one heck of a fight on its hands."
Any idea if the radeonhd driver will be in a usable state for these? Or does nVidia still lack competition on the Linux front?
Now that's a nice heater for the winter
So good that there is no reason to choose the 30 cm long humongous and expensive 280 over cheaper 4870x2. what do you think ?
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1Gb != 1GB
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
It's time to drop this old complaint. In my experience this hasn't been the case since around the time the Radeon 9700 was king (in Windows). In fact, with the problems Nvidia has been having on Vista I'd say the opposite is closer to the truth. Driver stability just isn't a problem for ATI/AMD any more.
However, playing with this early sample of 4870 X2 is a vivid reminder that we don't make these choices in a vacuum. The reality is that a single Radeon HD 4870 GPU is nearly fast enough to keep pace with the GeForce GTX 280. Even if you're running a game that lacks a driver profile or simply doesn't scale well with more than one GPU, the 4870 X2 ought to perform awfully well. And when it does get both GPUs going, as our results show, it's by far the fastest single video card we've ever tested. If this is how AMD rolls, it's hard to complain.
thats good news for gamers' wallets.
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1GB == 8Gb
I read the internet for the articles.
16 chips actually. You missed the eight chips per processor part in your calculations.
I'd say not working on Vista was a feature.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
With the help of one helluva strong reality distortion field generator.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
While I had no problems running XP or Vista using ATI drivers, I certainly have issues running X on Linux with ATI drivers. X keeps crashing at the weirdest times, whereas I have no problem with NVidia drivers.
Read the first sentence again: "The board has eight Hynix GDDR5 memory chips per graphics processor".
Eight x 1Gib per GPU = 1GiB per GPU.
FTFA:
That's, erm, considerableâ"beyond the obvious graphics applications, that's the sort of computing power that may one day enable men to figure out what women want.
If you are a guy and are looking at video cards to figure out what women want... errr, you're doing it wrong!
Even if you are referring to CPU cycles, they've tried this once, almost unanimously across the galaxy, 42 is not what women want.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
As my present location has poor ventilation, I'm quite keen on how my computer influences temperature. I've noticed a somewhat disturbing trend in both CPUs and GPUs in requiring more and more power and really firing up the heat. It looks like this monstrous card will definitely be a room heater. With the exception of laptops, are there any graphics cards available that won't make my room an inferno when I'm gaming?
... the X2's 1600 total stream processors have a peak computational rate of 2.4 teraflops. That's, erm, considerable--beyond the obvious graphics applications, that's the sort of computing power that may one day enable men to figure out what women want.
Allow me to note that the very idea of plugging a woman's desires into a matrix processing unit is precisely what women do not want. It simply won't work.
To effectively compute female emotions, you'd need something like a quantum computer where you get all possible results at once (and I do mean simultaneously), usually with lots of yelling, doors slamming, and things being thrown.
One bonus about these ati HD series cards is they support audio out through dvi. With a dvi to hdmi dongle it will also output 5.1 / 7.1 digital sound. Great for people who are using their pc as a home theatre hub.
It makes me laugh that people keep saying that Macs are too expensive, then they turn around and say stupid things like "400$ is a good price for a video card". 400$ is 2/3 of the price of a Mac mini.
What a stupid argument. If you want that video card you want to play games. If you want a Mac that will play games, it will cost damn near twice as much as a comparable PC that will do so. If all I want is a web browser I can pick one of those up for a couple of hundred dollars.
Please name one person who has said both of these things.
I had more trouble getting X to work properly with the ATI drivers than the NVidia drivers, but I've gotten both to work (and stable) recently. My biggest nightmare was when I tried to use an ATI card with Sabayon linux. I could only get half of the graphical features working at any given time, but beyond that I haven't had any issues.
Make a profile in the Catalyst Control Center, make sure ATI OverDrive is enabled and check marked. Now find the profile files in:
C:/Documents and Settings/{user name}/Local Settings/Application Data/ATI/ACE
Open the profile you just created in notepad and change these lines:
My 4870 still idles at 58C or so, but anything over 30% is just too loud for me to have running all the time. Swapping the thermal paste on the GPU has also produced some good results for people.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
and why even bring up macs in a thread about GPU's? mark the parent as a troll
All Macs have a GPU. Some have intel, some have ATI, some have nVidia. I don't see how GPUs are a Windows/Linux-only topic.
Competition = good news for the consumer.
Not really. If you look at the Linux support for both nVidia and ATI you will find that they are both lacking. And Intel isn't much of competition for them because, even though they are commonly used, they aren't as high-end as nVidia or ATI's offerings.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
A huge fight. This is being tested with beta drivers and it already far outclasses nvidia in every game I've seen reviewed except crysis, and it's neck and neck in crysis. Nvidia is going to get trounced, that's all there is to it.
You have a misconception about what temperatures should be. They should be whatever the manufacturer rates the part at. Not all parts have problems with high temperatures. My 8800 runs at about 90C and has done so for a long time, still works great.
Have some faith in the companies to test this. They have it run hot because it can run hot without ill effects.
Calling people stupid for buying a 1500$ Mac is okay but calling people stupid for buying a 400$ videocard is troll.
Typical slashdot.
Ill choose the 8Gb not the 1 GB
But they are the same!
No 8Gb is more then 1GB as 8 is a larger number then 1.
It is to bad that people just don't want to type out GigaByte and GigaBit. Heck I would like to see GigiByte and GigiBit as well. so you really can tell the difference.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Are there any decent video cards that run without adding another casefan and a 1000W PSU to my system?
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
I disagree with that. I had to replace my 9700 for Nvidia, it kept crashing my system. I tried two different PC's and even took it back to the store and exchanged it for a new one. ATI's support wasen't very helpful, they just ask for your direct x settings and hope you'll sort it out yourself. I also had a 2 year old predecessor to the 9700 (I can't remember the model number) same problems playing games. I'm a Canadian who tries to buy Canadian products (at the time ATI was Canadian), and both times bee disappointed that I had to replace my cards with Nvidia because their drivers were more stable. As for the Vista stability issues, I shouldn't have to upgrade my entire OS to make my Video card stable (it's bad enough I had to replace hardware). Sure Nvidia is having Vista problems, however they will sort it out and the majority of PC users are XP anyway.
Changed my password, some fucker was using my account. Sorry for the crap he/she wrote.
thats one generation behind. 3870 is its counterpart, and beats it in terms of noise level and energy consumption (hence heat). this is 4870.
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Ray Adams is continuing that project. it works great for auto fan speeds. you can even totally ditch catalyst control center and just use ati tray tools.
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very low power consumption, low price, and disproportionally high power. you can even x2 them and get a very decent gpu power.
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a $1500 mac is not enough to do the gaming that a $400 card equipped pc does. thats why.
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Well, if it were a video card that you bought through Apple, it would likely be marked up to the point where you'd need a mortgage to cover it.
Trounced for sure and two weeks later Nvidia will develop their ATI killer and we'll all toss our $500+ Radeon HD 4000's in the garbage and upgrade, only to discover ATI brings their revolutionary 4200 out a couple weeks after that which kills Nvidia but by then we all discover we have to upgrade our monitors to holographic projectors because thats the only thing that'll handle the retina burning refresh rates.
Trounced is a strong word for performance, you only trounce the competition if you can wallop them with performance AND price and I doubt this will fit most people's budget for a while and "thats all there is to it".
very probably be same with the 3870x2 thingy. should be around 200 cheaper than 280. at least early reviews a few weeks ago were saying that.
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I run an 8800GT off a decent 380W power supply. The power on the 12V line is abnormally high for a 380W rating, but still. The 8800GT does require an extra connector. My Antec Solo keeps it respectable at medium fanspeed on the single 12 CM fan. I pummelled it repeatedly over the months and could not get it to hang or do anything erratic, so I'm confident that this power supply is adequate for my setup.
A problem pervading power supply 'requirements', is that no vendor can require that simple rating. The actual requirement is more along the lines of 'this device will need X AMPs on this particular 12V DC circuit, gather all the requirements and sum them for each rail/voltaige'. Instead of doing this, they say 'need 500W power supply', as that gives them some headroom for crappy power supplies and a flexibility of choices of other components. This is one example of why a system OEMer *could* potentially do better than a home builder, as they can extract the hard data from the vendors more readily, and size a power supply correctly for the components instead of having to pull out the overkill parts.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Nor do drivers support games. Drivers support the OS and the API. The only thing a game supports is the API and the OS.
Are you serious? With the fglrx drivers, I get KDE4's composites features. Great. But any time I try to shut down X, I get a hard lock. With the radeonhd driver, I get FEWER crashes (using the git code - the last released version didn't work for me, either), but no composites, and even video is shaky. (AMD64, quad-core, with ATI 3870HD card.)
This is compared to my old nvidia-based P4 where video was *always* rock-solid using the proprietary drivers.
This card is two cards stuck together, with a shitload of memory, and all the required hardware to link the two together in SLI on the same board. Comparing that to a bare-bones basic-ass mac that can barely play H264 1080p video is laughable.
Try reading the comment mine was attached to.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
They need to get the memory bus width straightened out. The 4870 GPU does 1.2 tfps(Teraflops), the nvidia 280GX something like 933Gfps, but the 280GX beats it handily in framerates.
This is largely because 280 can get the textures from memory to GPU hella faster (115Gbps vs 141Gbps, 256 bit bus vs 512 bit on the 280) for compositing. As well the 280 has 1GB video memory.
Given equal memory subsystems the 4870 would smoke it. The memory subsystem on the 4870 is a huge handicap.
Unless the upcoming dual GPU doubles the memory bandwidth, it's no contest, the 280 GX wins. I'm hoping they do since I just bought a 790FX crossfire chipset motherboard. I'd be happy with a pair of 512 bit 1GB 4870s. I just hope they make them.
-Viz
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
Apparently families used to gather around the fireplace in the winter. My family? We have a LAN party.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
That's a sly trick, trolling by accusing other of trolling to throw the mods off trail. Still, I'll bite. The better Mac gaming does, the more games will support OpenGL. From there it's not a huge jump to make games for Linux, or get OpenGL Windows games to run in Linux through WINE with decent performance. (I've actually seen OpenGL Windows games get better framerates in Linux with WINE than Windows.) Mac gaming isn't huge, true enough, but that doesn't mean we don't want it to be. Chip away at MS's grip on the market from every angle.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
Changed my password, some fucker was using my account. Sorry for the crap he/she wrote.
Me too!
Man, my impersonator was a real jerk. Nothing but lucid, excellent posts from now on.
a $1500 mac is not enough to do the gaming that a $400 card equipped pc does. thats why.
Right, so the only measure of value is how much "gaming" your hardware will be enough for.
Therefore, typical Slashdot.
(Never mind the original point that you are paying a couple hundred dollar more for the video card just to turn some inconsequential settings from 10 to 11)
sic transit gloria mundi
Even ignoring Radeon, it sounds like Nvidia has enough problems: http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/07/09/nvidia.g84.g86.faulty/
Unfortunately, that isn't true in my case (Radeon HD 3850). 8.6 led to the death of my motherboard--it ran some hardware autodetection program and I guess the pre-selected options were incorrect for my case (northbridge and ide options were selected).
After rebooting, Windblows blue screened shortly after entering the desktop. It kept doing that (and sometimes even rebooted itself without a BSOD), so I tried to install an older driver in safe mode. After the installation failed (the hardware detection portion couldn't run in safe mode, apparently), I tried to install the older driver before it blue screened. Unfortunately, in the middle of installation, it rebooted itself, and the motherboard died. No video, no POST beeps, no power to the southbridge devices.
Some have claimed the BSODs stop when they get rid of the IDE and northbridge options, so I was perhaps too careless. But it's ridiculous that my motherboard failed because of a software driver. I hate ATI's drivers.
ATI has had a bad history of buggy drivers, so it's my fervent hope that under AMD's helm this frustration becomes a thing of the past.
Too true. I won't be the first person to try them out. I remember the old catalyst drivers as being the impetus for my initial switch to Nvidia. I'll wait until the dust settles around the holiday season and see how the other geeks at work do using ATI cards. 2 guys plan on switching to 48xx something. One guy for sure won't, even if Nvidia is slower, because he can't stand ATI drivers.
People say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Why? Is there any shortage of bad ones?
The whole point is that these AMD cards cost from 140 to 200 euro, and still manage to eat nvidia's 500 euro cards. RTFA.
I don't know if this will help you but there is a fix suggested there that resolved the issue for me.
You need to understand that some people use the computer for stuff that goes a bit beyond sending granny some emails or browsing myspace, for stuff where some computational muscle does in fact make some difference. Some enjoy playing recent computer games, which are very GPU-intensive, and some even need to have a high-powered machine to do number-crunching tasks for which they are paid for. For that class of users, powerful computing components are needed, components whose cost is proportional to the price.
On the other hand, the price of any apple computer is not proportional to it's computing power. It is exclusively related to how fashionable it is and how unnatainable it is for the masses (see veblen goods). Further than that there is absolutely no justification for the price Apple charges for their hardware. It is as justifiable as those 300 euro nike sneakers.
4870X2 has already been supported for a week (for 2D only) by both open source drivers, thanks to the Atom-Bios support.
For 3D see what the Mesa developer said a couple of posts above.
The Windows Catalyst and the Linux fglrx share a lot of common code and AMD has pledged to make efforts to keep quality in the Linux drivers.
The HD3000 has seen a very quick support in the closed source drivers. So probably the HD4xx0 will be supported into Linux fast.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Phoronix is a very Linux oriented news site, which also follows closely various development in both radeon opensource drivers, in geforce nouveau project, and the official binary drivers from ATI and nVidia.
radeonhd.org is a sister site they've put up, which more specifically hold news about both drivers and links to specific ressources.
Every once in a while, they do some benchmarks and thus you can have an idea about how these drivers perform.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
... So I'll make sure mine does. My argument might be that Apple computers - while they do not typically represent a great value - They really aren't as over priced as everyone tries to make them sound. I'm far from an Apple fanatic, but I have to tell you, I get tired of seeing people argue something they've made no effort to crunch numbers on.
For example, their $2800 Mac Pro Desktop has Dual 2.8Ghz Xeons (Harpertown, quad-core). On Newegg, they are each over $700 a pop. The board to put them in is a Dual 771 socket Intel board. Newegg lists a PC version of this for $650. The Mac Pro also includes 2GB of *buffered* ECC DDR-2 800Mhz. Registered RAM is considerably more expensive and I'm sure that'll run you at least $100.
($700 x 2) + $650 + $150 = $2200. I can probably stop here, but don't forget the snazzy case + 320GB hard drive + mediocre Radeon HD 2600 XT + pretty nice keyboard and mouse + support and warranty and that fantastic Apple packaging.. That doesn't really leave a lot for profit, does it? :\
I can do simliar comparisons with the Macbook and other Apple computers. Would you like me to? And true - they aren't budget computers - but you know what, they aren't a bad value for the speed, features and quality that you get. Even more specialized systems like the Mac Mini and iMac really aren't bad values when you factor in the unique design and functionality. Then there's those cool things like firewire target disk mode and magsafe that you just don't see on PCs... This is worth extra money and you pay for that, which I think these unique things could be considered part of the "Apple experience".
Apple doesn't do a very good job catering to gamers since their video cards are rarely 'cutting edge', but explain to me again how Apple is so egregiously overpriced for what you get?
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
No, stupid people are the ones who forked over $600+ for the GTX280 and couldn't wait 1-2 weeks to see how the 4850/4870 panned out ;)
If all *I* want is a web browsing capable system I could probably snag a 1u rackmount P3 system for under $50. That is not even mentioning desktop systems.
first, apparently you have no idea that how much those 'inconsequential' settings affect what you see on the screen
second yes, we use pcs to do stuff more than just 'arranging our mp3s', 'shuffling our photo albums', 'typing a document' and 'surfing the internet'. that includes gaming, one of the biggest entertainment of 21st century.
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you will find yourself hard pressed to shove that card into your case, and you may end up having to modify the case to make it fit. and you also gotta worry whether the pci-e slot will carry the weight of the card or not.
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Wow.
There is no need to spend $400 for a video card to play games. There are PLENTY of $150-range cards that are more than adequate to play everything currently available, and almost everything at "max settings."
Further, if your budget for video cards is $400, you're better off spending $150 now, and $150 in two years than to blow it all at once.
Compute power is a moving target. The wise buyer optimizes for cost per relative capabilities over time.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Wow. There is no need to spend $400 for a video card to play games. There are PLENTY of $150-range cards that are more than adequate to play everything currently available, and almost everything at "max settings."
I quite agree. Which is why I think that the extra markup Apple put on top of this is incredible.
Hey, you forgot to evaluate your expression, it returns true.
... plus you might have to buy a new power supply. My Seasonic S12+ 650W didn't have an 8 pin connector; I only bought it 10 months ago - it wasn't a cheap one - and thought it was all up to date...
Well, A$300 more later and I have a massive Corsair HX1000W and a functioning XFX GTX280, only to learn of the $150 price drops for the card just days after purchase and then the awesome value for money of the 4870 -- not to mention the prospect of all that X2 power.
(At least my heavily modified for water cooling and cabling hiding 900 case was big enough to fit it. Just. )
It's great to see ATI come back so strong. I honestly didn't expect it - it's keeping the entire market sharp. Good riddance to the +$1k prices of the 8800 ULTRA 1 year ago!
I'm not winging re the price drops. These things happen, it can't be helped and is just a question of time anyway. Q6600 3.7ghz / 8GB mem system works well in Server 2008 x64 - the GPU instantly clocking up ~15% from stock on core/mem/shader and that's still on air whilst I'm finding a water block. :)
ISO certified == THX certified
It's great to see ATI come back so strong. I honestly didn't expect it - it's keeping the entire market sharp. Good riddance to the +$1k prices of the 8800 ULTRA 1 year ago!
i didnt see that prices ever. 1 year ago i was using my radeon 1600 without any need for upgrade. i upgraded to 3870 for age of conan around 4 months or so ago, and at that time prices for 3870 was around $280. 8800 was around what, $500-600 or something. good thing i didnt see 1k prices.
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