Introduction
Sitting through presentation after presentation during AMD's technical
briefings held last April, two things were painfully apparent when suit
after suit evangalised about the brilliant and forward-looking
architecture of the R600 GPU (Radeon 2900 XT).
Firstly, there was no mention of it being a world-beater and, as such,
the fastest GPU in the world. Rather, the lack of such an announcement
condemned ATI - the graphics arm of AMD - to play second-fiddle in the
pure performance stakes at the upper echelons of the discrete
graphics-card market. NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GTX and Ultra SKUs offered
more from a gamer's point of view, frankly.
Reinforcing the fact that performance leadership was lost and not about
to be regained by a single-GPU architecture in the foreseeable future,
ATI priced the R600 aggressively, thereby offering decent value for
money - if £270, the launch price, could be considered decent
for a single component.
Introduced just over two months ago and improving on the R600 design by
endowing it with a larger feature-set, ATI's range-topping
Radeon
HD 3870
offered similar performance for just £150. It wasn't fast
enough
to give the now-venerable NVIDIA G80 SKUs a run for their money, but
battled well in the volume space where it competed against a couple of
NVIDIA refreshes - the GeForce 8800 GT and 8800 GTS 512.
ATI would have to architect a grounds-up design to substantially
increase pure performance. Such a move would be costly in terms of time
to market and, well, sheer design expense.
Now, it's done what we all expected, that is, combined two Radeon HD
3870s on to a single PCB, CrossFired them, and officially launched a
dual-GPU card to cater for the high-end of the market.
Let's now see if such a move pays off.
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