AMD seems to have regained the consumers’ support after the launch of the Radeon HD 4850 and 4870. The cards are performing well, especially in scenarios with antialiasing and anisotropic filtering, and even though they cost half ($199, $319) as much as NVIDIA’s new high-end beasts ($399, $649) they are not far behind in the reviews. AMD has another thing coming though, the dual-chip Radeon HD 4870X2.
The card, also been known as R700, has been surrounded by many speculations. The most persistent involve how the two GPUs will communicate. Initial rumors claimed a dual-core approach, which is not true. It’s not a Radeon HD 3870X2 remake either. The fact is that it’s not just the card that has been optimized for multi-GPU work, but the GPU itself as well. The optimization is mainly for improved scaling though, there’s still little known about microstuttering. Numbers close to 80% have been mentioned.
Over at Chiphell the following nude pics of Radeon HD 4870X2 have been posted;
The PLX chip between the GPUs now supports PCIe 2.0, but the exact nature of the remaining changes are yet to be unveiled. The card has two 512MB GDDR5 memory buffers, most likely the same 3.6GHz chips found with Radeon HD 4870. We suspect these won’t be shared as so many were hoping.
Some performance indications have also been posted and they state that Radeon HD 4870X2 will outperform Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire with around 15% with a decent system in general. We should know more as we approach the launch in late August.
