The good news for AMD is that its new 3800-series GPUs are much better processors than the absurdly power-thirsty Radeon HD 2900 XT that thudded onto the market earlier this year. The bad news is that the faster of the new Radeons—the Radeon HD 3870—is just slower than Nvidia's new GeForce 8800 GT. And AMD still doesn’t have a competitor for Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 GTX or 8800 Ultra.
But if AMD can convince its board partners to stick with its suggested pricing of $219 for the Radeon HD 3870 (with 512MB of GDDR4 memory) and $179 for the Radeon HD 3850 (with 256MB of GDDR3 memory), consumers will get a tremendous value. Nvidia told the media that 512MB cards based on the 8800 GT would sell for $250, but its street price as of yesterday was closer to $290.
AMD's new Radeon HD 3850 will be equipped with a single-slot cooler.
Both of AMD's new GPUs are manufactured using a 55nm fabrication process (compared to the 80nm process used to build the ill-fated Radeon HD 2900 XT), and both are outfitted with 320 stream processors (the same number as the 2900 XT). AMD admitted in a recent press briefing that they weren't seeing the benefits they expected to gain from the 512-bit memory interface used on the 2900 XT, so they've cut the 3800-series down to a 256-bit interface (it's 512 bits wide internally). This undoubtedly reduced the complexity and final cost of the part. (The transistor count actually went down, from 700 million in the 2900 XT to 666 million transistors in the new parts.)
THE SAME, BUT DIFFERENT
In addition to frame-buffer size and memory type, the two parts differ in core and memory clock speeds: Reference-design 3870 cards will have their cores clocked at 775MHz and their memory running at 1.125GHz; they'll be equipped with dual-slot coolers. Cards based on the 3850 will have 670MHz cores and 830MHz memory and will be outfitted with single-slot fans. AMD matches Nvidia's 8800 GT in supporting PCI Express 2.0 and by including its Unified Video Decoder (UVD offloads all HD DVD and Blu-ray video-decoding chores from the host CPU, and it's a feature that's missing not only from the Radeon HD 2900 XT, but also from Nvidia's much faster GeForce 8800 GTX and Ultra. The 8800 GT does have this feature.) The 3850 and 3870 will support HDCP on both DVI links, too, so that 30-inch panels can scale copy-protected high-definition video to their native resolutions.
AMD will one-up Nvidia's 8800 GT in a big way when they enable support for triple- and quad-GPU configurations in motherboards with more than two PCI Express slots (AMD has dubbed this CrossFIreX). The new cards will eventually support multiple displays even in CrossFire mode (with up to eight displays with CrossFireX on motherboards equipped with AMD's upcoming RD790 chipset). The 8800 GT presumably won't be capable of running beyond dual-GPU mode because it's outfitted with only one SLI edge connector; and none of Nvidia's SLI configurations support more than one monitor while SLI is active.
DIRECTX 10.1 SUPPORT
The 3850 and 3870 will be the first GPUs to support DirectX 10.1 and Shader Model 4.1, which is expected to ship with Vista Service Pack 1; but when you consider how unenthusiastic game developers have been about digging into DirectX 10, I don't think this will amount to anything more than idle bragging rights for the foreseeable future. I have the same opinion of the tessellation unit that's in these GPUs as well as the 2900 XT: It's a cool feature, but until it's exposed in DirectX 10, it won't deliver any real benefits.
The Radeon HD 3870 will have faster clock, speeds, GDDR4 memory, and a double-slot cooler.
That 55nm fabrication process enables the 3870 to consume far less power than the insatiable 2900 XT. We tested an engineering sample 3870 board a few weeks ago, and our benchmark rig drew just 117 watts at idle and 208 watts under load. That same system sucked down 175 watts at idle and an obscene 318 watts under load with the 2900 XT installed.
I recently received an Asus EAH3870 board (based, as you've probably guess, the Radeon HD 3870), which has its core clocked at 851MHz and its memory humming along at 1.143GHz. This board was slightly slower than the EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GT SSC Edition that it compared it with, although the Radeon beat the GeForce in some Vista tests.
The 3800 series has some great features, it beats the 8800 GT on price, and it wins on some Vista benchmarks. I'm so happy to finally see some real competition in this space, which is where a lot of buyers are going to be spending money in the next few months. AMD still doesn't have an answer at the very high end of the market, but I don't imagine that will last too much longer. Check the print edition of the magazine for more information about these new products.
WINDOWS XP BENCHMARKS (DIRECTX 9)
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