ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2

Posted at: 5:38am 28th January 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

It really is two Radeon HD 3870s bolted together, but ATI reckons it's got 1TFLOP of processing power

People laughed at the 3dfx's dual-GPU Voodoo5 5500 when it came out, but it looks as though it may have just been ahead of its time. Not only did Nvidia release the GeForce 7950 GX2 with two GPUs back in 2006, but now ATI has followed suit with the Radeon HD 3870 X2; its first official dual-GPU card since the Rage Fury Maxx back in 1999.

As its name suggests, the 3870 X2 is basically a huge PCB featuring two 55nm Radeon HD 3870 GPUs, which gives you a huge total of 640 stream processors, 32 ROPs, 1GB of RAM and two 256-bit memory interfaces to allow the GPUs to communicate with 512MB of memory each. These memory interfaces can cope with either GDDR3 or GDDR4 memory, as with those on standard 3870 cards. However, given that GDDR4 memory isn't exactly cheap, a standard X2 card will only come with 900MHz (1.8GHz effective) GDDR3 memory, as opposed to the 2.4GHz GDDR4 memory found on standard 3870 cards.

To make up for this, the clock speed of the two cores has been increased from 775MHz to 825MHz, and AMD reckons that all of this now makes the Radeon HD 3870 X2 'The industry's first graphics processor to break the Teraflop (one trillion floating point operations per second) barrier.' Of course, it isn't a graphics processor; it's two, but that's still an incredible achievement for a graphics card, referring to its Multiply-Add processing rate.

As well as this, the cards will also feature two independent display controllers, allowing you to have two monitors with different resolutions, refresh rates and even different video overlays. ATI reckons it's the best graphics card system out there at the moment. Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager of AMD's Graphics Product Group, AMD said that 'with this launch we reaffirm our commitment to enthusiast performance leadership and send a clear message that the ATI Radeon 3870 X2 is the new gold standard of the PC gaming world.'

This is the first time that ATI's gone for the top of the graphics world since the Radeon X1950XTX, as both the 3870 and 2900XT were pitched below Nvidia's GeForce 8800 Ultra and GTX cards. This time, though, it's confident that the X2 will trounce the Ultra, and ATI has issued quite a few benchmark results showing that the X2 beats the GeForce 8800 Ultra in many games, including Bioshock and Call of Duty 4, at 1,920 x 1,200 and 2,560 x 1,600.