Radeon HD 4870X2 sports next generation PCIe bridge

[Andreas G]

Radeon HD 4870X2, also known as R700, is the only outspoken high-end card of the Radeon 4000 family. It's not impossible we will see Radeon HD 4850X2 as well, but it will be up to AIB partners to decide. The rumors have been many, ranging from the extreme ones claiming a MCM design where the two cores would be merged together, to the less exciting R680 copy/paste design. It seems we will land somewhere in between, far from surprisingly. Stories are going around that RV770 CrossFire may not suffer from microstuttering, but nothing can be said for certain at this time. What we do know for certain is that AMD has reworked the bridge of the dual-chip card.

According to a slide published over at OCXtreme R700 will have "2nd generation PCI Express bridge design + next generation GPU interconnect for improved scaling". Along with the vague description of the card is a screengrab from 3DMark Vantage and a complete run of the eXtreme Preset. GPU-Z shows four RV770 GPUs, which means two Radeon HD 4870 linked via CrossFireX. What makes us a bit suspicious is the fact that the detection of the card works so well here, but then again muich of the data presented by it is off by a margin or two. In any case, the score is X12515. The system specifications are unknown.

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[hsew]

that's jaw dropping performance. Isn't it twice as much as what the 280 can get?

Oh, and something I've noticed is that people keep bashing the 4850 because it keeps losing to the GTX280 in benchmarks and stuff, but that's just because of its low memory capacity and bandwidth compared to the giant card. the 4850 should have had a 512 bit interface as well...oh well.
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I'm just your average hardware loving guy.

[Delph1]

4850 is Mainstream, 4870 is Performance and won't be restricted by memory bandwidth and should shine

//Andreas
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"I'm sort of a postmodern vegetarian, I eat meat ironically"
"You are our Swedish superhero "

Forget everything, knowledge is your enemy, it's only going to make you second-guess yourself."

[hsew]

It should pwn the 280 and be a huge slap to nvidia. Hopefully they'll stop releasing dud products from now on.
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I'm just your average hardware loving guy.

[Araris]

This has been proven fake as a 4870 alone scores X4400 in 3DMARK Vantage and if Crossfire scaling was 100% it should score X8800, the score represented by this 4870x2 is wrong as this score represents (assuming Crossfire scaling is on average 60%-80%, which it normally is) dual 4870x2s.

[alur]

Araris, if you look at the picture it says R700 in CrossfireX e.g. 2x 4870x2. Not 2x 4870.

[Delph1]