Hardware Revolution

Introduction:
To be released on August 12th, the codename R700, also known as the Radeon HD 4870 X2, is ATI’s next flagship card. Today, you get to read on a preview of this card and discover the ace that ATI have in its sleeve.

The Radeon HD 4870 X2 card is AMD’s answer to NVIDIA’s high-end GTX 280 card in terms of pricing and placement.  Even though NVIDIA recently shocked everyone and lowered the price of the GTX 280 from $649 to $499, the estimated price I’ve heard of for AMD’s card is in the $500 range and will likely fall given some time.  I love competition!

The Card:

Click on the picture for high resolution.

As you can see, the long card tradition goes on. As long as the Radeon HD 3870 X2 and the 9800 GTX and X2, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is cooled with a dual-slot cooler, to dissipate all the heat created from the two gpu of course! The board itself is 10.5″ long, and there are two power sockets on the R700, just as there were on the older X2 model, meaning you need a PSU with at least one six pin and one eight pin plug to power the card. Outputs on the reference model come in the form of two dual-link DVIs that support the DVI-to-HDMI adaptors and audio output, as we have seen on AMD’s cards since the arrival of the R580, as well as TV-out.

Click on the pictures for high resolution.

On the front of the card, you can see the two RV770 gpu chips and the PLX switch chip. With it, comes 8 Hynix memory chips. There is just a single CrossFire connector on the HD 4870 X2 card that will allow you to connect either one or two single GPU HD 4870 cards or one more HD 4870 X2 for quad CrossFireX support. This comes as a surprise, as AMD declare that it had tested 4 HD 4870 X2 in CrossFireX, for a total of 8 gpus. Hopefully, the retail model with come with 2 Crossfire connectors.

Click on the picture for high resolutions.

On the back of the card, you can see the dual retention brackets for the heatsinks attached to each GPU, as well, along with 8 Hynix memory chips. Here, if you’re a geek and love specs, you might pause to reflect on the 4870 X2’s likely specs. The RV770 GPUs early samples are clocked at 750MHz, the same speed as the regular 4870. As a result, the X2’s 1600 total stream processors have a peak computational rate of 2.4 teraflops. That’s very impressive, I wonder how much folding@home or SETI you can do with that =)

Although Hynix memory chips on engineering samples are rated for up to 4Gbps operation, they run at the same 900MHz base clock and 3600MT/s data rate as on the Radeon HD 4870. That is far from bad though. The R700 has a 512-bit path to memory that theoretically peaks at 230GB/s. To give you an idea, its closest competitor, the GeForce GTX 280, has “only” 142GB/s of peak memory bandwidth.

Alright, all of this look good, especially the black PCB, but I know what you all want! Performance, results and the answer to THE question: Does it beat the Nvidia GTX 280. Now, if I was to tell you here, you would all leave now and not read the rest of this post. So bear with me here =)

Of course, the other question that we have is, can it run Crysis, like it was intended to be? Keep reading

Benchmarks:

Crysis:

Rather than using a timedemo, Crysis was tested by playing the game and using FRAPS to record frame rates. Because this way of doing things can introduce a lot of variation from one run to the next, each card was tested in five 60-second gameplay sessions.

When playing, I’m on a hillside in the recovery level having a firefight with six or seven of the bad guys. As before, I’ve tested at two different settings, with the game’s “High” quality presets and with its “Very high” ones, also. This is an average of the recorded fps.

Disclaimer: Those links are affialiate links. If you click on them, it will open a new window, which will bring you to the product page on NewEgg, where you can buy it, except for the Radeon HD 4870 X2, which is not available at the moment. I get a small % of the sales and the price is the same for you, so if you appreciate my work, this blog, this article and would like to show it by helping me out, please buy your video card(s) through those links. Thank you =)

1920 x 1200 High Quality
Radeon HD 3870 X2 25.0
Radeon HD 4850 21.8
Radeon HD 4870 26.8
Radeon HD 4850 CF 28.9
Radeon HD 4870 CF 29.9
Radeon HD 4870 X2 30.6
GeForce 9800 GTX 22.7
GeForce 9800 GTX SLI 36.0
GeForce 9800 GX2 35.0
GeForce GTX 260 24.4
Geforce GTX 280 30.1
Geforce GTX 280 SLI 38.5

1920 x 1200 Very high Quality
Radeon HD 3870 X2 16.4
Radeon HD 4850 14.9
Radeon HD 4870 18.5
Radeon HD 4850 CF 22.4
Radeon HD 4870 CF 23.7
Radeon HD 4870 X2 24.8
GeForce 9800 GTX 14.8
GeForce 9800 GTX SLI 28.1
GeForce 9800 GX2 24.7
GeForce GTX 260 17.4
Geforce GTX 280 20.3
Geforce GTX 280 SLI 27.9

Performance recap: Well, well, what do we see here? The Radeon HD 4870 X2 is faster than the GTX 280, by a small margin, but nonetheless, it’s ahead. Only .5fps in high quality, but in very high quality, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 is ahead by 3.4 fps or 17%! This is where all that bandwidth shows its power!

Now, keep in mind that this is only only one benchmark, although other games benchmarks released on the web today confirm the trend: ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 is, well will be, the most powerful card on the market when it will be released! ATI will be taking back the crown of performance, unless Nvidia has a surprise coming very shortly!

Conclusion:

It is clear to me that ATI have a product which is able to beat the GTX 280, by quite a margin on very high quality some way. Now, the only con I can see with the R700 is that it’s not released yet! Rumors says that you can expect it for August 12th. If ATI can deliver the product at a price which compares well with the GTX 280, which recently dropped as low as $499, with good drivers, then we have a very interesting ATI/Nvidia war ahead of us. It would seem that Nvidia clearly underestimated ATI here.