Early Thoughts
Radeon HD 3870, the flagship RV670 implementation, is what's set to steal the limelight for 230 Euros and 512MiB of memory today. We've had a look at performance data from our good friends at The Tech Report and Hardware.fr, and their data suggests that the HD 3870 is essentially just a HD 2900 XT in terms of performance. It's faster or slower in some cases (cases you can probably imagine), which is to be expected because of the GPU's final capabilities, but it's generally just as quick.
Therefore to reiterate, it's about half the cost for pretty much the exact same performance, with a better cooler, better video, better physical attributes and support for DX10.1. What's not to like? Well, the early data shows that because it's about as quick as HD 2900 XT, it can't really overtake GeForce 8800 GT, but then take into account price, which AMD is relying on everyone doing.....well, you can see the appeal.
HD 3850's initial performance showing is somewhat less, seemingly mostly because it's saddled with a 256MiB framebuffer space to play in, not because the GPU is slow. Most of the time though, as you'll see if you read The Tech Report's analysis, it's got 8800 GTS 320MiB pegged or beat. Hopefully the 512MiB version of the 3850 will look even better. RV670 isn't taking back the ulimate performance crown (or even some of the lesser speed awards depending on how you look at things), but being effectively R600 again, that was never on the cards overall.
Thus with all that said, is RV670 the GPU to get AMD back on its feet? We say yes, because it is the confluence of all the things we talked about in the opening salvo of this article. Things are fixed, it goes fast, and it does so with sweet physicals and very keen pricing. We look forward to testing our initial assumptions to see if they hold up. You're going to need to care about price/performance though, for AMD's obvious message to sink in.
Certainly compared to HD 2900 XT, HD 3870 is a complete no-brainer. You just would not buy the former product any longer. It's EOL in the eyes of the gamer from this day forth, unless you want another one for Crossfire (you poor soul) or you find one for some silly price. HD 3870 is AMD's best graphics product, and it's just 230 Euros on paper. The HD 3850 at the theoretical 180 euros also looks to be a very worthy contender in the mainstream segment of the market.
So, if you're looking to buy one of these cards today or within the next couple of weeks, what's our recommendation? Sadly, there's no clear cut answer we can give you because of the pricing uncertainty in the coming weeks, but if you don't have a good reason to choose either the 8800 GT or the HD 3870/3850, we can only suggest you to decide on a case-by-case basis.
Look at the prices you'd have to pay for the different alternatives from where you are, and look at the average performance of these alternatives to decide if the premium for one product over the other is worth it for you. All of these products are fantastic deals and massive improvements in performance/dollar over previous offerings from both companies, so you can't go wrong either way.
If you're looking for benchmarks, we'll have to redirect you to those from our friends at the Tech Report and Hardware.fr for the time being. The latter is in french (the translation at behardware.com isn't up yet), but given how close bar charts are from an universal language, it shouldn't be much of an issue.
