PC General Discussion Thread

[Power666]

Originally Posted by chedabob

Only covers a few of the GPUs. There's nowhere near enough documentation to create an open-source driver. The only reliable way to get that info is to reverse-engineer, which hinders progress.

Except that an open source driver has been created from these documents...

[chedabob]

Originally Posted by Power666

Except that an open source driver has been created from these documents...

But it doesn't support all the GPUs yet...

Stop arguing with me damnit

[Power666]

The Radeon 3870X2 has officially been released today. It is basically two Radeon 3870's put on to one card in Crossfire mode. The specs of the Radeon 3870X2 vary a bit (higher GPU core clock, lower memory clock) form the plain Radeon 3870. Ultimately, the performance of the Radeon 3870X2 is the same as two separate Radeon 3870's in Crossfire mode with the any difference in performance falling into the margin of error. So if you have a motherboard capable of supporting crossfire with two Radeon 3870's, that seems to be the route to go.

What hasn't been tested are two Radeon 3870X2's for a quad GPU configuration. The driver for this simply isn't ready. It'll be interesting to compare this to high end SLI and triple SLI set ups from nVidia.

Speaking of comparisons with nVidia, the Radeon 3870X2 doesn't seem to quite match a single Geforce 8800GTX. With improved drivers, the gap may close but the Radeon 3870X2 is being released now where as the Geforce 8800GTX arrived over a year ago. The good news is that the Radeon 3870X2 carries a lower price than the Geforce 8800GTX currently. The bad news is that new nVidia cards are arriving in a few months.

[SorryIhaveToGoWii]

"Speaking of comparisons with nVidia, the Radeon 3870X2 doesn't seem to quite match a single Geforce 8800GTX. ."

In about every test I read the X2 beat the 8800 Ultra in every game except in crysis I and quake wars.

[Power666]

Actually playing the game and using FRAP to record FSP throughout reveals a different result (see here.)

[SorryIhaveToGoWii]

Ok, sorry then
So, what method does the other rewievers use to meassure fps? The "benchmark" or what to call it that comes with some games?
I don't know so much about review metohds.

[chedabob]

Originally Posted by SorryIhaveToGoWii

Ok, sorry then
So, what method does the other rewievers use to meassure fps? The "benchmark" or what to call it that comes with some games?
I don't know so much about review metohds.

Most games can output the FPS to text. Or the reviewers just take the reading that the engine gives out every few seconds.

[Power666]

The other way skew results is to run games at low resolutions where the CPU becomes a bottleneck. This is just generally bad as the difference in performance between video cards generally narrows to that of the margin of error.

High end video cards really need high resolution displays to be stressed (1920 x 1200 or 2560 x 1600 for example). Cranking up anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering helps too.

[STARSBarry]

AA past 4x is a waste imo

[underzr0]

Originally Posted by STARSBarry

AA past 4x is a waste imo

i agree, it looks to Crispy.