4870x2 early preview

[Brackle]

IF they price this bad boy at $500, they will just have to drop the prices of the 280 gtx for sure.

One thing I dont get is. Why people get so excited about Crysis Benchmarks....No one plays the game anymore, its over 6 months old, and the only reason people use it is for a benchmark tool. Might as well use the new 3dmark if you going to make or break a buy off of Crysis.

Just my .02c

 

[Moofasa~]

run at even higher framerates that have no bearing on gameplay

Don't put words in my mouth. The faster a card is the higher the image quality (in this case edge-detect) can be turned up.

IMO people would rather have a game that currently brings all hardware to it's knees, run at higher more playable framerates,

Not if they will never play said game.

 

[GoldenTiger]

so no microstuttering?
?

Close to none per testing done at XS. The frame times are almost completely even, close to as with a single-card setup,

 

[cannondale06]

91C idle
94C load

screw that

 

[morfinx]

91C idle
94C load

screw that

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°C) and tuned for low noise levels. In other words, these temperatures are more or less by design and not necessarily a problem.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/15105/7

 

[Krenum]

Eh the heat really doesnt bother me, Im sure they know how hot it gets and designed it to take the punishment, plus, it doubles as a heater for your room you can save on your electricity bill by not running your heater, its the economic video card

Everyone, lets all huddle round its warm loving embrace

 

[pandora's box]

Eh the heat really doesnt bother me, Im sure they know how hot it gets and designed it to take the punishment, plus, it doubles as a heater for your room

sure is nice being in the basement and it being warm down here now with my 2 hd4850's

 

[cannondale06]

sure is nice being in the basement and it being warm down here now with my 2 hd4850's

Im on the third floor of my house so Im screwed in the summer if I want to game with a card like that...

 

[alg7_munif]

JC has a valid point. In real world game play in the four games here the CoD4 and HL2 numbers just don't mean a lot. Sure the 4870x2 is faster in those games, and the GTX 280 is still so fast they gaming experienced isn't enhanced noticeably by most people.

The point of top end cards isn't so much to get 100 FPS out of already well performing games, its to get better performance out of games with already marginal performance. That's how most people decide to upgrade in forums like these, when their current hardware doesn't cut it for their favorite games, not to play HL2 at a 110 FPS.

Crysis is just one game, we don't know yet about future games but if the HD 4870 X2 is already faster than GTX 280 in every other games except for this one Crysis game, I doubt that it won't be faster than GTX 280 in future games.

Btw you always said that GTX 280 in SLi is faster than the X2 but GTX 280 in SLi use two PCI-E slots and cost twice as much so you should compare the X2 in CrossfireX with the GTX 280 in SLi.

 

[Sycraft]

I wouldn't worry too much about the temperatures. People have kinda gotten in to the "Low temperature = good" mentality but that isn't always the case. Components have certain ranges in which they can work. The important thing is that they don't go above whatever it is they can handle. Well, in the case of a card with manufacturer designed cooling, they are calming it can take those temps. If it can't and fails because of it, that's their problem, and they'll be providing you with a replacement.

If you are concerned because of heat being released in to your room, ok that's one thing. However if it is a just a general worry about card temperatures, well don't be because they are designing them for that and testing them at that.

 

[cow]

im not worried about temps as much as power draws for a single slot card like this, just crazy.

Quote from Hardocp Preview

"More power testing going on now but we saw 700w system peaks under full CF load."

 

[Leepox]

i dont worry about the high temps of the cards. I worry about baking myself to death in my room. (Winter please come back soom so i can CF these babies) lol im sure nobody wants winter... i have yet to go to the beach.

Anyhoo... ill be picking this card up on december. I dont look at crysis benchmarks anymore given the fact that my brain always keeps telling me "the game proggies for this game needs lessons on optimisation - like using your other 3 cpu cores for example.. to its fullest"

 

[ChronoDetector]

Nice, I'm so picking up this card. So glad I didn't get a 280 GTX, not to mention its way overpriced.

Looks like ATI is back in the game, welcome back ATI. And this card has so many advantages over the GT200, GDDR5 and DirectX10.1 support which GT200 lacks.

Though I'm disappointed that no card can play Crysis with full settings, I don't really expect a card to achieve that soon.

 

[Frostex]

Crysis is so badly coded it cant even utilize dual GPU's properly....every game smokes on a 4870x2 maxed out except crysis... clearly BADly coded...and Crytek pretty much admitted it

OK I'm sick of comments like these.

If you're going to make this sort of comment can you please provide some good evidence that Crysis is badly coded. It simply running slowly is not proof that it's badly coded.

There is no other game that provides the same kind of graphical fidelity in such a complex setting (jungle)

All the developers admited to is saying they can make warhead run better, but we have no actual evidence of this, so until warhead is released and we can see better performance with no IQ loss then we should just consider that as more PR bullshit to make us all buy their next game.