Our friends over at MadBoxPC have gotten their hands on quite a few slides from a quite recent ATI/AMD presentation covering the upcoming Radeon HD 3800 series. Yesterday we reported about how a Dutch store had published the prices of both Radeon HD 3870 and 3850, but the prices were a bit high. According to these slides, the prices will be more like $150-250 USD, which correlates better with what we've heard. The reasons for the lower prices are many; surplus of chips, desperate need to sell them and a certain need to deliver a punch or two towards NVIDIA.
What you might not have heard or perhaps realized before is that the lower frequencies and the 256 bit memory interface will actually make it slower than the Radeon HD 2900 XT. And since we know how the 2900 XT compares to the GeForce 8800 GT ... and there are no slides comparing the performance of HD 3800 GPUs with similar NVIDIA GPUs.
Calling the RV670 a die-shrink is misleading. Even though the chip is made with 55 nm technology, it also features several bug fixes, UVD, DirectX 10.1, and ATI PowerPlay. You might not have heard of PowerPlay before, which is completely understandable as it is not a performance enhancing feature and has mainly been used with the mobile GPUs. PowerPlay will lower the power consumption of the chip even further and make sure that power is only used when actually needed. They've simply added another dimension to the 2D/3D clocks settings.
As covered in previous reports, Radeon HD 3870 will sport a 775 MHz CPU clock frequency and 1.225 GHz GDDR4 memory frequency, while Radeon HD 3850 will have a 670 MHz core clock and 830 MHz GDDR3 memory clock. This is about 50 MHz lower CPU frequencies than we had expected and the reason is suppose to be relatively weak coolers, which raise certain questions whether these cards will overclock that much with stock cooling.
Both of them will have 320 shader processors running at the same clock as the core, 256 bit memory interface, 16 TMUs and 16 render back-ends.
Last but not least we have the Radeon HD 3870 X2. Unfortunately there's not that much information in the slides, but a date, a vague date. Winter.
All of the slides can be found over at MadBoxPC (translated via Google).
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