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ATI Radeon HD 3870 – first benchmarks
It’s a like the 3850, but a little bit faster
We’ve got some good news and some bad news here. The good news is that we’ve got a Radeon HD 3870 in the labs and we’ve tested it. The bad news is that the BETA drivers that ATI gave us for the card are causing a biblical amount of grief with Need for Speed: Carbon and S.T.A.L.K.E.R., so we’ve yet to get any decent benchmarks from those games. However, as we know that you’re waiting on tenterhooks for 3870 benchmark results, we thought we’d at least share the results we’ve got with you.
Let’s start by covering the differences between the 3850 and the 3870, which is firstly the memory; the 3870 has 512MB of GDDR4 memory clocked at 2.4GHz, compared with just 256MB of 829MHZ (1.66GHz effective) GDDR3 memory on the 3850. However, both the 3870 and 3850 use a 256-bit memory interface, with a 512-bit Ring Bus interface for memory reads and writes. The 3870’s core is also clocked a little higher, at 775MHz, and it accordingly comes with a larger dual-slot cooler.
The other difference, of course, is the price. Sapphire told us that the RRP for the 3870 card that we tested is £140 inc VAT, making it £30 more than the RRP of its 3850 card. That said, the more realistic asking price for 3870 cards, such as this Gigabyte card from Scan, appears to be around £153. Either way, though, that’s still a good £20 cheaper than a 512MB GeForce 8800 GT, so do you really lose anything by skimping on £20?
Unfortunately for ATI, the answer is yes. With its extra memory and higher clock speeds, the 3870 should bridge the gap to a resolution of 1,920 x 1,200 with 4x AA, which was out of the reach of the 3850 because it only had 256MB of RAM. However, while the 3870 was quicker than the 3850 in F.E.A.R. with 4x AA and 16x AF, the minimum frame rate of 18fps still made the game unplayable. Comparatively, the 512MB GeForce 8800 GT managed a playable minimum frame rate of 29fps at this resolution.
That said, the 3870 performed much better than the 3850 in our Company of Heroes DirectX 10 benchmark, in which the former actually managed to produce a playable frame rate of 26fps at 1,024 x 768 with no AA, while the minimum frame rate of 23fps at 1,280 x 1,024 would also be sufficient for RTS fans who aren’t sticklers for fluid animation. Comparatively, the GeForce 8800 GT managed a minimum frame rate of 24fps at 1,024 x 768 with no AA.
