AMD vs Nvidia - it's back on
It's official, the fortunes of AMD / ATI ship are turning around, with their new 4870 X2 deemed the new king of the hill in PC gaming performance.
PC performance freaks should take note: ATI is back. AMD just announced the ATI Radeon 4870 X2, a card with two Radeon 4870 processors on board (and a massive 2G of memory), and from the benchmark results we’ve seen it’s very competitive with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 280.
On the bench
According to AnandTech, for example, it comfortably beats the GTX 280 in most benchmarks and is actually very competitive with two GTX 280 cards in SLI mode.
Our friends at Atomic have also posted some pics and a tasty round of initial benchmarks.
It’s not a cheap card by any means, and it’s a tremendous power hog, but it’s cheaper than buying two cards for SLI performance (and you don’t need to find a motherboard with two PCIe slots).
AMD has turned their ship around
This is a big turnaround from AMD, which had been slipping behind on the graphics front, while Nvidia was releasing larger, faster and more ambitious processors.
Multi-core vs the behemoth GPU
ATI also seems to be taking a different route to performance than Nvidia. Nvidia’s GTX 200-series processors are freakishly large and power hungry.
AMD seems now to prefer a multi-core approach to boosting performance, producing a single general purpose processor that suits the mid-range market, and for the rarer performance market it simply combines multiple processors onto a single card – it has even built circuitry into the processor to support efficient on-card communication between processors (so it’s more than a basic SLI-on-a-card solution).
I wouldn’t even be surprised to see three and four-processor cards in the near future from AMD.
Also see our ATI vs Nvidia Labs Test
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