R700 Inter-GPU Connection Discussion

Is that "very good" means quite over the GTX280, to say?

 

Will this preview be out before NDA is up?

 

Muropaketti doesn't have the habit of releasing reviews before NDA is out, or at least haven't had so far

 

no, it won't.

 

Well kids here she is:

http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews.php?reviewid=588&pageid=1

 

Looks to be within the margin of error of 4870CF in all the tests but WiC

 

The min fps increase of the R700 over 4870CF in Half-Life 2 and CoD:4 are pretty decent (DH totally screwed up Crysis, why even bench it at 1280x768?). So out of the three games tested, R700 looked pretty good.

 

Only in 2560x1600. The extra ram perhaps.

 

They actually tested with standard Cat 8.6?
I think I'll just wait for some proper review

 

Perhaps.

I assumed the interconnect would only help in certain games (let's face it, if a game already scaled well with Crossfire, what is an interconnect going to do?). Which is why I'm really disappointed DH screwed up Crysis, would have been a good one to test.

 

When I read factory overclocked R700s, I immediately thought of future cards needing 2 8pin connectors.

 

Nice to see higher min FPS on the R700.

Also, for those wanting to compare to the GTX 280, do take note they're using an XFX XXX edition which is clocked significantly higher (670 core / 1458 shader / 2500 mem) than the standard cards (602 core / 1296 shader / 2214 mem). They're also using Cat 8.6 drivers.

 

PCI Express specs allow only up to 6+8pin, no way for 8+8pin

 

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?p=1188920#post1188920

 

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3354&p=7

Nice use of Vram , agains the Croosfire with the 4870 and 512 MB Vram !!

 

Well it's evolution not revoution but it's darn fast!

 

After all the rumours to expect "something" at least a bit different gpu-gpu connection wise for 4870x2 to 3870x2, I wonder what the fuzz was about. There appears to be nothing different at all. All benchmark differences seen between the 4870x2 and the Crossfire 4870 look like just differences due to the different amount of ram (btw, use of hynix memory is remarkable as up to now afaik all cards used samsung gddr5 memory).
Maybe the Crossfire port got a bit faster, and certainly in contrast to 3870x2 it now uses a pcie 2.0 bridge chip. But fundamentally it seems to work exactly the same.

 

The results seem in line with a single HD4870 though. Maybe a bug in the older driver's CF profile?

 

Yeah pretty disappointing. The one game that really needs this kind of power, Crysis, it doesn't help much in, and even loses easily to GTX280 in Crysis in the the DH review. In most of the other games it's a case of who cares if you get 80 frames or a hundred?

That and Anand hinting that it doesn't scale with some games at all, just like any CF/SLI solution, I thought the "new interconnect" was supposed to alleviate that?

Also, the reviews didn't investigate micro-stuttering.

So yeah from my perspective, disappointing. Especially the Crysis performance. This may really highlight one downside to AMD's strategy, very new games like Crysis just may not take well to multi-GPU.

Still, it'll probably sell well to the [H] forum types who just want the biggest numbers on a graph.

Edit: well, [H]'s reviews shows Age of Conan is another game where the power is actually needed, and 4870X2 performs phenomenally there.

 

Because the people who want a comparable/superior card for cheaper are non existent?