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."

Re:1gb mem

[grasshoppa]

1Gb != 1GB

Re:Driver Support

[hr.wien]

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.

Re:1gb mem

[jandrese]

1GB == 8Gb

Re:Crysis benchmarks are very good

[jandrese]

Unless you were buying it today, since only one of those boards can be bought by mere mortals at this point. You are correct however that the G280 is really looking like a Spruce Goose for nVidia right now. I guess the 8800GTX really was a hard act to follow.

Re:Driver Support

[repvik]

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.

htpc usage - audio out

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:radeonhd driver?

[MostAwesomeDude]

By the time they ship, we might have released working 3D drivers for these, through xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-radeonhd. Can't guarantee anything, though, since we don't even have the documentation, but I do know that there's been some NDA work going on already.

And yes, I AM a Mesa dev. :3

Re:Driver Support

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

4800 running too hot?

[Xelios]

ATI's release drivers this time around were actually really good, minus one small problem. Default fan speed on all the 4800's was set way too low (20% I think) and the automatic fan speed control isn't working. As a result all the 4800's show some really high temperatures (75C+ idle). There's a work around for this until ATI releases a driver update to fix it (or at least let you set fan speed algorithms in the control center):

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:

<Feature name="FanSpeedAlgorithm_0">
<Property name="FanSpeedAlgorithm" value="Automatic" /> <--- Change to "Manual"
</Feature>
<Feature name="FanSpeedRPMTarget_0">
<Property name="Want" value="0" />
</Feature>
<Feature name="FanSpeedPercentTarget_0">
<Property name="Want" value="30" /> <--- 30 is quiet, 45+ for gaming
</Feature>

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.

Re:Heat

[Tsuki_no_Hikari]

eVGA GeForce 8800 GTS 512. It's a wonderfully cool card. Nearly silent if you manually lock the fan at 55% speed. At that speed it idles around 45 degrees with a well vented system. I've honestly never seen it go above 55 degrees even in Crysis. The fan is just that good in it. The air coming out of it does get a fair bit warm when running the most modern games, but I've found that your CPU will be putting out more heat than this thing unless a game is made to tax the VPU THAT much more than the CPU.

I definitely suggest it as a mid-high range card. Plays Crysis at 128x1024 with all settings on high between 25-35 fps. Also, this card works beautifully with an Antec 900 case.

excuse me

[unity100]

thats one generation behind. 3870 is its counterpart, and beats it in terms of noise level and energy consumption (hence heat). this is 4870.

Get ATI Tray Tools

[unity100]

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.

4850

[unity100]

very low power consumption, low price, and disproportionally high power. you can even x2 them and get a very decent gpu power.

Re:4800 running too hot?

[schnipschnap]

In fact, the article addresses this issue, see this page [techreport.com]

All of the Radeon HD 4800-series cards we've tested have produced some relatively high GPU temperatures, and this early X2 card is no exception. When we asked AMD about this issue in relation to the 4850 and 4870 cards now shipping, they told us the products are qualified at even higher temperatures (over 100 [degrees] C) and tuned for low noise levels. In other words, these temperatures are more or less by design and not necessarily a problem.

Yea but what about memory?

[rgviza]

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

Re:Driver Support

[BrentH]

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.

Re:Yea but what about memory?

[rgviza]

No it has the same bandwidth to each GPU. They don't share texture memory. If they did, it would be a crapload faster than 2 4870s in crossfire mode.

As it is, the 4870s in crossfire edge it out. They alternate frames and use discrete memory allocated to the individual GPUs for textures. It's a pair of RV770 GPU's with the same problem on one PCB.

4870's that aren't memory starved will smoke this, like I said in the last post. This card is still memory starved. It's 2 256 data paths, one to each GPU. The author is mistaken. One look at the PCB layout will show you this. Each GPU has 4 ddr5 IC's flanking it.

While it has 1024MB of memory on the card, it really only has 512MB of texture memory that will be duplicated for each GPU.

-Viz

Re:radeonhd driver?

[Anonymous Coward]

Radeon Driver Feature Matrix [x.org]

The RV700 are similar to R600 series, so the rightmost columns apply to RV700 too.