AMD's Radeon HD 4870 X2: R700 First-Look : Two Times The Compute PowerAlthough AMD took the hardware community by surprise with the performance of RV770 and the derivative Radeon HD 4850/4870, things didn’t go entirely according to plan. The company launched its boards immediately after Nvidia, which turned around and slashed the prices on its own models, determined to win this round of the ongoing graphics card war.
And yet, a month and a half after the launch of AMD’s newest round of products, the verdict hasn’t changed. Neither the GeForce GTX 260 nor the GeForce 9800 GTX+ (only recently made available) can take on the Radeon HD 4870 with regards to price or performance, even in light of heavy cuts from Nvidia.
But AMD’s not out just to make waves with the gamers looking for value. It also wants to reclaim a crown it lost a long time ago to Nvidia’s last two generations of large, monolithic programmable graphics architectures. As a means to that end, the company is putting a pair of its most impressive GPUs on a single PCB and calling it the Radeon HD 4870 X2. Now the question remains: does the new board have the muscle to take on Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 280, the single fastest card?
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