Triple and Quad CrossFire, specifications
CrossFire shifts to third and forth gear… well soon
Whereas for NVIDIA, the quad-SLI failure was so overwhelming that it actually never existed (some new developments are coming soon…), AMD hence takes the opportunity to steal the Chameleon’s thunder, if we can actually call it that, by introducing the possibility to group 2, but also 3 and 4 identical cards with its Radeon HD 3800. In reality, this is just an announcement however, since the drivers shouldn’t truly be ready until next month at best, AMD itself talking about an actual maximal improvement of only x3.3 with 4 cards. The Global Illumination demo that we were able to see with the manufacturer was indeed working on such a machine with beta drivers and was clearly not stable.
This possibility will require another chipset, the AMD 790FX, which we’ll go over in more detail after the Phenom launch. The next drivers should also introduce the Overdrive for Crossfire systems, meaning the ability to increase every card’s clock at the same time.
Specifications
In the end, how does one explain this decline in number of transistors? Probably by the presence, in the R600, of disabled redundant units, meant to improve yields, considering the size and process of the chip. It’s also probable that certain features appearing with the RV670 were already present on the R600, but disabled because of bugs.
| GPU | HD 3850 | HD 3870 | 8800 GT |
|---|---|---|---|
| GPU’s Clock | 670 MHz | 775 MHz | 600 MHz |
| Shaders’ Clock | 670 MHz | 775 MHz | 1500 MHz |
| Memory’s Clock | 833 MHz | 1125 MHz | 900 MHz |
| Width of the Memory Bus | 256 bits | 256 bits | 256 bits |
| Memory Type | GDDR3 | GDDR4 | GDDR3 |
| Memory Quantity | 256 Mo | 512 Mo | 512/256 Mo |
| Number of Pixels/Vertex Pipelines | (80) | (80) | (28) |
| Number of Texturing Units | 16 | 16 | 56 |
| Number of ROP | 16 | 16 | 16 |
| Throughput | 429 GFlops | 496 GFlops | 336 GFlops |
| Memory Bandwidth | 53.3 GB/s | 72 GB/s | 57.6 GB/s |
| Number of Transistors | 666 million | 666 million | 754 million |
| Process | 0.055µ | 0.055µ | 0.065µ |
| Die’s surface | 196 mm² | 196 mm² | 324 mm² |
| Generation | 2007 | 2007 | 2007 |
| Supported Shader Model | 4.1 | 4.1 | 4.0 |
Good news in any case, using a 55 nm process enables AMD to own a chip that has a surface two times inferior than that of the R600, and more importantly, significantly smaller than the G92 by at least 41%. A real weapon in the oh-so-important price war fought between the market’s two manufacturers, even if, once more, we need to take into account AMD’s yields, which are probably worse at 55 nm than those of NVIDIA’s G92.
- Previous page Radeon HD 3000: a new architecture?
- Next page Radeon HD 3850 and 3870
- BIOS Flash - Overclock Your Graphics Card in 5 Minutes
- Six Graphics Cards with Luxury Trimmings
- Workstation-Shootout: ATi FireGL V7600 vs. Nvidia Quadro FX 4600
- AMD HD 3800 To Support DX 10.1
- Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GT Reviewed
- DirectX 10 Shootout: Geforce 8x00 vs. Radeon 2x00
- DirectX 10 Cards on a Budget
- The Best Gaming Graphics Cards For Your Money: October 2007
- Can Integrated Graphics Cut It For Gaming Or HTPC?
- ATI's Radeon 2600 XT Remixed
Personally I'd be happy with that as it means my £400+ investment will last me a good number of years.
If you're disappointed that there's games you can't play I have a 6800 Ultra I'll happily swap for your 8800 GTX
:|
I have an 8800GTX SLI system and I struggle with Crysis on medium settings @2560x1600.
I'm waiting for something faster... whether it is from ATI or nVidia.
ATI continue to disappoint.
On a more important note: where are the Crossfire and SLI scores? The great thing about these new cards (both the 8800GT and the 3850/3870) are the fact that you're getting what, just months ago, was enthusiast-level performance for mainstream-level pricing. This makes SLI and Crossfire immensely much more affordable than they have ever usefully been before.
Previously it was always the case that you got better price/performance from a single high-end card than you got from two mid-range ones. Now, for the first time, that may no longer be true: 3850s in Crossfire might even outperform 8800GTX some of the time, and they're actually *cheaper* than single GTX.
So, come on: where are the benchmarks?
Finally, your noise level measurements are obviously flawed: you've got a 43dB noise floor, resulting from components other than the graphics card, or possibly from stuff going on outside the case. So it doesn't matter how quiet the GPU fan goes, you'll always read ~43dB. The cooler on the 3850 is rated at just 31dB, which is *miles* below the noise level you get from an 8800GT. Your figures are misleading.
At least I want to know if it's as good as the 1900 at crunshing lifesaving data!
With AMD/ATI going down the toilet Nvidia is not getting enough pressure to move on the next generation (1Gb+ cards with enough horsepower to handle HD gaming). Rebranding 2xxx cards as 3xxx is pretty desperate!! That is the bottom line... Even with VERY deep pockets you will still struggle to get high quality textures running @1920x1200 (native 1080p the true resolution of BD and HDDVD disks).
I have a feeling that AMD/ATI may not be around much longer. If a company isn't diversified (like Sun) then a failure in your core business means you are pretty screwed. If ATI didn't have products like the X1950Pro they would be in real trouble already...
nicolasb -> Previous comment about Crossfire. THG said the driver was unstable for the new 3xxx cards in the introduction. Perhaps you have problems reading??
Ah well, have to wait till 2009 for that monitor upgrade!!
Bob
I look forward to seeing what kind of scaling these will produce, because that does seem to be their main selling point. As the previous guy said, you can get 2 of these cards for less than a GTX, and potentially equal perfomance, while still leaving room for another 2 cards =)
The HD 2900 XT's scaling results were actually pretty impressive, SLI showing a 50% boost at best, while crossfire showing as good as 90% in some games.