ATI Radeon HD 4770 marketing slides leaked
April 15, 2009 by Cabro · Leave a Comment
ATI Radeon HD 4770 (RV740) marketing slides leaked
Crisis Management Solution 2: ATI Radeon HD 4670 CrossFireX Performance Review
March 30, 2009 by Cabro · Leave a Comment
In the times of economic meltdown solutions that provide acceptable performance at a relatively low price are extremely demanded. We decided to check out one of solutions like that: ATI Radeon HD 4670 CrossFireX tandem.
We used to say that multi-GPU solutions, especially discrete ones, were limited to expensive and luxurious computers of enthusiasts who did not care about money when it came to ensuring maximum performance. Even if not worse in terms of sheer speed, entry-level multi-GPU solutions used to be inferior to single-GPU cards in such consumer properties as reliability, compatibility, ease of use, etc.
Still, multi-GPU technologies have been evolving and getting rid of their downsides. And we can now say that they have matured for real, especially in the hands of AMD/ATI specialists. Their Radeon HD 4870 X2, based on two rather simple and inexpensive RV770 GPUs, has enjoyed a long period of being the fastest single-PCB graphics solution, beating the best single-chip products Nvidia could offer.
CrossFireX technology has not been that successful in the lower market sectors, though. For example, the Radeon HD 4850 X2, a less advanced counterpart of ATI’s flagship model, has not been recognized by ATI’s manufacturing partners and is so far represented with only one product on the market (it is the Sapphire HD 4850 X2 2G/1G GDDR3 and you can read about it in our earlier review). Users’ demands seem to be fully satisfied with classic single-chip graphics cards in the lower price segments although there is a niche for multi-GPU technologies there, too. As we showed in our earlier article, a pair of Radeon HD 4830 cards cost less than one Radeon HD 4870 but delivered higher performance (and offered an inexpensive way of upgrading the graphics subsystem for people who had one Radeon HD 4830).
Considering the recent reduction of prices on AMD/ATI’s produces, we are interested to learn how appealing an even cheaper CrossFireX subsystem, based of two Radeon HD 4670 cards, may be. This simple affordable RV730-based graphics card is a perfect choice for HTPCs but is no good for gamers due to its low performance in modern games – it has only 8 raster back-ends and a 128-bit memory bus. The new recommended price of the Radeon HD 4870 is only $149 (for the version with 512 megabytes of memory) and buying two Radeon HD 4670 cards at once won’t be much of a saving. But is there an option of cheap upgrade if you’ve already got one such card? Let’s see how effective this anti-crisis solution is from a technical point of view.
ATI Catalyst 9.3 Driver: Performance Express-Test
March 20, 2009 by Cabro · Leave a Comment
ATI Catalyst drivers development follows a very precise schedule. The number after the point in the driver index stands for the release month. Since February is over and March has already passed its middle, the time has come for the new ATI Catalyst driver version 9.3 to be released. So, what do the ATI Catalyst driver developers can tell us about the new version?
According to the release notes, Catalyst 9.3 doesn’t promise any performance breakthroughs in any of the contemporary games, except Lost Planet: Colonies shooter, where we should see up to 20% performance improvement for Radeon HD 4800 cards and up to 50% improvement for less powerful solutions, such as Radeon HD 4600, 4500 and 4300. They also mentioned that performance may increase in a few other cases when it is limited by the CPU. They also haven’t forgotten about Folding@Home distributed computing project fans: the performance in GPGPU mode is also supposed to be increased.
GTX 280 ForceWare 177.35 Performance
June 19, 2008 by Cabro · Leave a Comment
Word has been floating around the big cyber town we call the internet that the new WHQL drivers were going to give some much needed performance increases to the just launched GTX 200 series of cards.
We figured that graphs speak louder than words, so today we took the time to test the new drivers under XP and Vista across a range of benchmarks on our ZOTAC GTX 280. I’ve decided that although there are new Catalyst drivers available for me to test, people would be more excited to see what NVIDIA can do to (hopefully) squeeze more performance out of the GTX 200 cards. I’m in anticipation of seeing some nice increases today, as I’m sure everyone else reading this is too. We will have our latest Catalyst performance article online within the next couple days.
While a lot of sites have loved the GTX 200 series of cards, they don’t seem to completely understand what’s going on in the AMD camp. I can honestly say that NVIDIA need the GTX 280 to get a speed bump, or gamers may be flocking to AMD for their graphics card sooner rather than later.
