Anyone got one of these, gone and ordered this to replace my 8800gtx, i plan to sell the gtx and by a second card to pwn pretty much every game out there.

MSI HD 3870 X2 1GB GDDR3 Dual DVI HDCP TV Out PCI-E Graphics Card - Ebuyer

 

bit of a messy solution isn't it ?

Bolting two GPU's onto one card via on-board crossfire.

R700 was delayed, so they resorted to that.

 

Actually it works very well, game dependant of course but sli has it problems, ati seems to have got crossfire right.

Although atm it has it's quirks but so does every new product, amd promise to bring out regular driver revisions as this is really what plagued ati in the past not so much the architecture.

When made use of it screams past the ultra cards.

 

Just read a review and its only getting an extra 1 frame per second more than an GF 8800 Ultra on Crysis ? Has it got a lot up its sleeve ? Is Crysis CPU bound ?

 

Here have a read of this, the performance figures are now a few fps higher as there was a new driver released after the review and yet are still betas.

Crysis alone went from 42 fps to 52 1280x1024@high from that driver revision alone.

Most will say oh but it has 2 cpu's, true but compare the price/performance to anything nvidia has not to mention it's still a single card, i have a crossfire board and if good enough i may buy a second when the crossfire x drivers are released sometime next month.

AnandTech: ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2: 2 GPUs 1 Card, A Return to the High End

Crysis is gpu bound, but the drivers as ive said are still betas and daamit promise to update them much faster than past attempts.

Look at the review to see what it's like, and there's still more to be had from it.

 

horses for courses I suppose - if you're into SLI / dual GPU's then fair play

bit too power hungry and noisy for my liking, but I'm not committed to chasing fps anymore.

And of course, no sooner than you've installed it, and Nvidia will come along with a dual 8800 card

 

Yeah the 9800gx2 but it'll run extremely hot in fact it'll have do not touch warnings on the card.

Rumour has it they're having a hard time with the card and in the past they have had problems with dual gpu cards ala 7950gx2 which was a big flop.

The r700 however will be interesting seeing the drivers are already there for multi gpu so will be mature upon release.

Personally i want ati to do well, nvidia have been resting on their laurels for too long.

Tbh all i want is a card that'll play crysis etc smoothly and i'll be happy.

 

do you know why they don't implement dual-core ?

 

Probably as games don't fully support it, least at the time of the 7950gx2, plus dual core was never needed as core revisions gave sufficient gains to make it wortwhile.

But with sli and crossfire being out a while and with cpu's gone down the same route it makes sense for gpu's now to do the same, i mean look at the performance hike it gave intel.

 

I see Nvidia has just bought Ageia. Unless they insist on a separate card, they're going to have to factor that chip into the mix too. Surely things will get a little crowded on the board if they don't start using dual-core soon? Not to mention the power requirements from the onboard crossfire bridge.

Regards games not supporting dual-core GPU's, they already have the code path to detect and utilise dual-core CPU's, so I don't imagine its a stretch to do the same for GPU's too?

 

Well sli and crossfire have been out a while so i can't see it being no different, the x2 is seen and treated as a single card as the controller is on board so it'll work with whatever board you have anyway.

Ive seen the specs of the up and coming 9 series and tbh it's only a jump to 65nm while the x2 uses 55nm.

Things are hotting up again.

Btw gpu's nowadays lend themselves to physics which makes it unusual why nvidia bought out aegia in the first place.....

 

There's a convergence coming between the 3D acceleration and physics acceleration. Both rely heavily on floating point performance, so I'd assume it makes sense to integrate the two.

Reasoning ? Intel started the ball rolling buying Havok. So in a similar vein to EA buying Criterion, its bad news for the industry in general. I'm sure developers would've preferred Ageia and Havok to still be independantly owned.

So once Intel did that, it was only a matter of time before Nvidia or ATI bought the remaining player, Ageia.

Result ATI left in the cold and both Nvidia and Intel can lock down the use of the 2 biggest physics API's in the industry.

 

Hey hux, let me know if you are selling the GTX. If the price is right I may well be very interested.

 

It's up on ebay bud, it's not just a gtx, it's a bfg oc2, she's up there with the ultra cards, i just fancied a change.

Speccy, rumour has it nv are twitchy as they ballsed up their nf chipset thus making everyone jump onto intel and that means no sli sales, plus crossfire is meant to run much better when implemented, don't ask me how id assume it's how the two cards share the load better but there's enough out there should you want to chase some info.

Mind maybe by buying aeiga they just plan on restricting physics tech for ati, funny think is if you think about it, amd/ati make crossfire for intel, direct competitor for the whole intel vs amd thing and rumour has it nvidia/intel partnership isn't very rosy atm hence why things have been quiet, guess intel didn't like nv making their own chipsets time will tell.

BFG GeForce 8800GTX OC2 768MB PCI-E Graphics Card on eBay, also, Desktop PCs, Computing (end time 14-Feb-08 15:38:42 GMT)