Crossfire and Video Memory

[jonmb78]

I'm trying to decide whether I should pick up another 4870 or wait for the 4870X2. How does the memory management work in crossfire? From what i've heard it makes me think that it's only a total of 512MB (512mb cards) and it's cloned on both cards. Is this true? The main game I play right now is age of conan, and the only bottleneck I have sometimes is video memory (get a stutter sometimes when i'm in cities and it's try to load in all the textures as I move from location to location).

 

[Kaldskryke]

I'm trying to decide whether I should pick up another 4870 or wait for the 4870X2. How does the memory management work in crossfire? From what i've heard it makes me think that it's only a total of 512MB (512mb cards) and it's cloned on both cards. Is this true? The main game I play right now is age of conan, and the only bottleneck I have sometimes is video memory (get a stutter sometimes when i'm in cities and it's try to load in all the textures as I move from location to location).

You are correct, even with GDDR5 memory still can't be completely shared between the two GPUs. So HD4870 crossfire is indeed limited to 512MB. The HD4870X2 has 2GB of physical memory, so you'll get 1GB that's usable if you wait for that one.