AMD's Dual GPU Monster, The Radeon HD 3870 X2

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."

Re:But does it run Linux?

[habig]

No mention from the article summary of whether this is supported by ATI's recent decision to release driver source code. If you buy this card can you use it with free software?

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.

Re:Seriously? Yawn.

[Cerberus7]

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.

Re:Driver dependent performance

[chromozone]

ATI/AMD's drivers can make you cry. But their Crossfire already scales much better than Nvidia's SLI which is a comparative disaster. Most games use Nvidia's cards/drivers for development so Nvidia cards hit the ground running more often. As manky as ATI drivers can be, when they say they will be getting better they tell the truth. ATI drivers tend to show substantial improvements after a cards release.

Re:Anyone remember . . .

[TheRaven64]

The Rage 128 Pro was never close to the top of the line for a graphics accelerator (and doesn't really qualify as a GPU since it doesn't do transform or lighting calculations in hardware). It was around 50% faster than the Rage 128, which was about as fast as a VooDoo 2 (although it also did 2D). You had been able to buy Obsidian cards with two VooDoo 2 chips for years before the Maxx was released, and the later VooDoo chips were all designed around putting several on a single board.

Re:But does it run Linux?

[GuidoW]

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-setting and 2D-support and maybe TV-Out, but certainly not 3D-acceleration. There was a promise by ati to release even more documentation in the future to allow these things, but so far, I haven't seen anything. I did some googling to find out if maybe I've missed something, but that turned up very little. Even the X.Org wiki didn't help much.

So, does anyone here know a bit more? What's the real status of the released docs? Is there enough to do a real implementation with all the little things like RandR, dual head support, TV-Out and 3D-support, or is ati just stringing us along, pretending to be one of the good guys?

Re:But does it run Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Watch this space: http://airlied.livejournal.com/ [livejournal.com]

Re:Seriously? Yawn.

[Anonymous Coward]

Judging from the comments here it seems that the market for this card is for Crysis players who want to play at max settings. That is a pretty narrow market.