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AMD's Dual GPU Monster, The Radeon HD 3870 X2
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Jan 28, 2008 09:41 AM
from the heckuva-lot-of-video-cards dept.
from the heckuva-lot-of-video-cards dept.
MojoKid writes "AMD officially launched their new high-end flagship graphics card today and
this one has a pair of graphics processors on a single PCB.
The Radeon HD 3870 X2 was codenamed R680 throughout its development.
Although that codename implies the card is powered by a new GPU, it is not. The
Radeon HD 3870 X2 is instead powered by a pair of RV670 GPUs linked together on
a single PCB by a PCI Express fan-out switch. In essence, the Radeon HD 3870 X2
is "CrossFire on a card" but with a small boost in clock speed for each GPU as
well.
As the benchmarks and testing show, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 is one of the
fastest single cards around right now. NVIDIA is rumored to be readying a dual
GPU single card beast as well."
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But does it run Linux? (Score:4, Interesting)
(Extra points if anyone pedantically takes the subject line and suggests targetting gcc to run the Linux kernel on your GPU... but you know what I mean...)
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Re:But does it run Linux? (Score:5, Informative)
While AMD has done a good thing and released a lot of documentation for their cards, it has not been source code, and has not yet included the necessary bits for acceleration (either 2D or 3D). That said, I'm watching what I'm typing right now courtesy of the surprisingly functional radeonhd driver [x.org] being developed by the SUSE folks for Xorg from this documentation release. While lacking acceleration, it's already more stable and lacks the numerous show-stopper bugs present in ATI's fglrx binary blob.
Dunno yet if this latest greatest chunk of silicon is supported, but being open source and actively developed, I'm sure that support will arrive sooner rather than later.
Parent
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Actually, what did they really release? I remember some time ago, there was a lot of excitement right here on /. about ati releasing the first part of the documentation, which was basically a list with names and addresses of registers but little or no actual explanations. (Although I guess if you have programmed graphics drivers before, you'd be able to guess a lot from the names...)
The point is, it was said that that these particular docs were only barely sufficient to implement basic things like mode-set
Well, barely (Score:2)
But, yes it does run Linux.
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With AMD Open Source Linux Drivers (Score:4, Funny)
Multiprocessing everywhere! (Score:5, Funny)
When can I have a quantum graphics card that displays all possible pictures at the same time ?
Re:Multiprocessing everywhere! (Score:5, Funny)
Cool éh?
Parent
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Goatse, hot tub girl and "Can I haz cheeseburger" at the same time? No thanks.
Sounds wasteful, but isn't (Score:2, Redundant)
For those who haven't been following the recent releases of ATI graphics cards, it's probably interesting to note that the AI HD2850 and HD2870 use only 20 Watt when idling (most low-end cards use at least 30W nowadays, and high-end cards are often closer to 100W).
So that should mean that this new card should eat about 40W whe
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RTFA (Score:2)
They only give power consumption for the whole system, 214W when idle, 374W when under load (!)
SOme basic math on their results gives you the 3870 consumes 50W when idle, and the X2 consuming 100W when idle and up to a massive 260W when under full load.
(3870 at idle = 164W, 3870 X2 at idle = 214W, hence 3870 = 50W)
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Who needs it? Probably graphics artists who are rendering amazingly complex scenes. I can imagine it would help some game designers and potentially even CAD architecture-types. Probably not so much with films because I think they're rendered on some uber-servers.
Who wants it? Gamers with more money than sense and a desire to always be as close to the cutting edge as possible, even if it only gains them a couple of frames and costs another £100 or more.
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Who needs it? Probably graphics artists who are rendering amazingly complex scenes. I can imagine it would help some game designers and potentially even CAD architecture-types. Probably not so much with films because I think they're rendered on some uber-servers.
Not necessarily. Most standard rendering engines eat system CPU a lot more than it ever would GPU - especially when it comes to things like ray tracing, texture optimization, and the like.
Most (even low-end) rendering packages do have "OpenGL Mode", which uses only the GPU, but the quality is usually nowhere near as good as you get with full-on CPU-based rendering. Things may catch up as graphics cards improve, but for the most part, render engines are hungry for time on that chip on your motherboard,
Don't bother (Score:2, Insightful)
Seriously? Yawn. (Score:4, Insightful)
Graphic cards have long since been really fast for 99.9999% of cases. Even gaming. These companies must be doing this for pissing contests, the few people who do super high end graphics work, or a few crazy pimply faced gamers with monitor tans
Re:Seriously? Yawn. (Score:5, Informative)
Me, I'll be waiting for the card that can do Crysis set to 1920x1200, all the goodies on, and 50-60fps. Until then, my 7900GT SLI setup is going to have to be enough.
Parent
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While it was definitely a performance improvement over my 6800 sli setup, the qualit
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The real problem here is people feeling like they are missing out because of the higher se
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I recently bought a new 24" monitor (PLE2403WS [iiyama.com]) from Iiyama. Very nice monitor, but a few problems integrating it with my current video card.
The monitor is 1920x1200 at ~60Hz. The manual for my graphics card (GeForce PCX 5300) claims it can handle 1920x1080 and 1920x1440, but not 1920x1200 :-(
Ok, I kind of expected I would need to get a new graphics card, but I am finding it difficult to find out what
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Actually, graphics power isn't fast enough yet, and it will likely never be fast enough. With high-resolution monitors (1920x1200, and such), graphics cards don't yet have the ability to push that kind of resolution at good framerates (~60fps) on modern games. 20-ish FPS on Crysis at 1920x1200 is barely adequate. This tug-of-war that goes on between the software and hardware is going to continue nearly forever.
Me, I'll be waiting for the card that can do Crysis set to 1920x1200, all the goodies on, and 50-60fps. Until then, my 7900GT SLI setup is going to have to be enough.
But then you'd just be complaining that resolution Xres+1 x Yres+1 can't be pushed as FPS N+1. Honestly, you only need 24 to 32 FPS as that is pretty much where your eyes are at (unless you have managed to time travel and get ultra-cool ocular implants that can decode things faster). It's the never ending b(#%*-fest of gamers - it's never fast enough - doesn't matter that you're using all the resources of the NCC-1701-J Enterprise to play your game.
Not at all (Score:5, Insightful)
So one goal in graphics is to be able to push a consistently high frame rate, probably somewhere in the 75fps range as that is the area when people stop being able to perceive flicker. However, while the final output frequency will be fixed to something like that due to how display devices work, it would be useful to have a card that could render much faster. What you'd do is have the card render multiple sub frames and combine them in an accumulation buffer before outputting them to screen. That would give nice, accurate, motion blur and thus improve the fluidity of the image. So in reality we might want a card that can consistently render a few hundred frames per second, even though it doesn't display that many.
There's also latency to consider. If you are rendering at 24fps that means you have a little over 40 milliseconds between frames. So if you see something happen on the screen and react, the computer won't get around to displaying the results of your reaction for 40 msec. Maybe that doesn't sound like a long time, but that has gone past the threshold where delays are perceptible. You notice when something is delayed that long.
In terms of resolution, it is a similar thing. 1920x1200 is nice and all, and is about as high as monitors go these days, but let's not pretend it is all that high rez. For a 24" monitor (which is what you generally get it on) that works out to about 100PPI. Well print media is generally 300DPI or more, so we are still a long way off there. I don't know how high rez monitors need to be numbers wise, but they need to be a lot higher to reach the point of a person not being able to perceive the individual pixels which is the useful limit.
Also pixel oversampling is useful just like frame oversampling. You render multiple subpixels and combine them in to a single final display pixel. It is called anti-aliasing and it is very desirable. Unfortunately, it does take more power to do since you do have to do more rendering work, even when you use tricks to do it (and it really looks the best when does as straight super-sampling, no tricks).
So it isn't just gamers playing the ePenis game, there's real reasons to want a whole lot more graphics power. Until we have displays that are so high rez you can't see individual pixels, and we have cards that can produce high frame rates at full resolution with motion blur and FSAA, well then we haven't gotten to where we need to be. Until you can't tell it apart form reality, there's still room for improvement.
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I think they're releasing a new Elder Scrolls soon.
Driver dependent performance (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Driver dependent performance (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Does it come with... (Score:4, Interesting)
I haven't heard anything about any specs for 3d operations being released from AMD. I know they were talking about it, but what happened then? Did they release anything while I wasn't looking?
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Ever since I made the mistake of buying a Matrox G200 (Partial specs - more complete than what ATI has released so far as I understand it, and a promise
Buy Intel (Score:2)
Typical Reply: Boo hoo, Intel is too slow, boo hoo.
My reply: Intel's graphic cards won't get faster if no one buys them. Other companies won't open source their drivers if you keep buying them with closed source drivers. Other companies will only open their drivers if they see it works for Intel.
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I haven't heard anything about any specs for 3d operations being released from AMD. I know they were talking about it, but what happened then? Did they release anything while I wasn't looking?
They released another 900 pages of 2D docs around Christmas, 2D/3D acceleration is still coming "soon" but given their current pace it'll take a while to get full 3D acceleration. So far my experience with the nVidia closed source drivers have been rock stable, I have some funny issues getting the second screen of my dual screen setup working but it never crashed on me.
Drivers are something for the here and now, they don't have any sort of long term implications like say what document format you use. The d
it's missing stuff (Score:2)
also there should be 2 cross fire slots as each gps has 2 links and 2 out of 4 are used to link each other.
If you can't beat 'em... (Score:2)
Next up... (Score:3, Funny)
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Pretty cool if you ask me.
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Take a read through hardocp's review [hardocp.com] for an example.
As to why AMD released? Well, my understanding is that NVidia is looking to release thier own 2-GPU card (9800 GX2) in Feb/March. Given the benchmarks of the current cards, I can't see the 3870 X2 holding up well... so... beat 'em to market. Although when you factor price in, I'd imagine it'll still be competitive; just not anywhere near
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