ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 released and reviewed
Tuesday 12th August 2008, 07:19:00 PM, written by Rys
Multi-GPU has come a long way since NVIDIA resurrected the idea with SLI and NV40 back in the day. Today's implementations get significant driver engineer hours spent on them, and the form factor has evolved to where two-GPU boards are expected parts of the product stack.
AMD take things a step further these days with multi-GPU that works with multiple active displays while the GPUs are contributing to rendering together, so their solution is instantly more attactive.
Then when you consider the recent release of the excellent Radeon HD 4870, where the underlying GPU has incredible perf/area and perf/watt characteristics, and gobs of raw compute, an X2 was always going to get gamers dribbling.
Tech Report have spent time with product in the weeks following the sanctioned previews, and their analysis highlights a couple of important points. First is that the new Radeon HD 4870 X2 is the fastest single board graphics product ever engineered. Fact.
The current state of play means that it's now rare for a popular game not to be supported by at least two GPUs in tandem. And if support isn't there at game release time, you usually don't have to wait long.
Second is that there are still caveats to observe if you're seriously considering investing in multi-GPU that scales past two chips. Indeed, it seems like that's still a worthless endeavour for all but the most dedicated. Tech Report's analysis show that 3- and 4-way GPU setup are a perf/watt disaster for the most part, with limited scaling (although the CPU is the limit in a couple of tests, not the graphics hardware) for a large monetary and environmental cost.
Still, with the Radeon driver letting you be flexible with multi-GPU -- an important point for me personally -- one board seems more than enough.
2.4Tflops of compute, 1GiB of memory per GPU and board physicals that aren't too scary mean that if you have $549 to spend, which is less than the cost of two HD 4870s pretty much, you know what to spend it on.
Check out Tech Report's full analysis.
AMD take things a step further these days with multi-GPU that works with multiple active displays while the GPUs are contributing to rendering together, so their solution is instantly more attactive.
Then when you consider the recent release of the excellent Radeon HD 4870, where the underlying GPU has incredible perf/area and perf/watt characteristics, and gobs of raw compute, an X2 was always going to get gamers dribbling.
Tech Report have spent time with product in the weeks following the sanctioned previews, and their analysis highlights a couple of important points. First is that the new Radeon HD 4870 X2 is the fastest single board graphics product ever engineered. Fact.
The current state of play means that it's now rare for a popular game not to be supported by at least two GPUs in tandem. And if support isn't there at game release time, you usually don't have to wait long.
Second is that there are still caveats to observe if you're seriously considering investing in multi-GPU that scales past two chips. Indeed, it seems like that's still a worthless endeavour for all but the most dedicated. Tech Report's analysis show that 3- and 4-way GPU setup are a perf/watt disaster for the most part, with limited scaling (although the CPU is the limit in a couple of tests, not the graphics hardware) for a large monetary and environmental cost.
Still, with the Radeon driver letting you be flexible with multi-GPU -- an important point for me personally -- one board seems more than enough.
2.4Tflops of compute, 1GiB of memory per GPU and board physicals that aren't too scary mean that if you have $549 to spend, which is less than the cost of two HD 4870s pretty much, you know what to spend it on.
Check out Tech Report's full analysis.
Tagging
ati ± radeon, x2, rv770, hd, 4870, tech, report, scott, is, teh, funny
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