ATI chose to give its graphics circuit strategy a serious overhaul one generations back. In the past, NVIDIA and ATI have been battling for having the most powerful GPU on the market, no exception, but at the moment it's just NVIDIA who is walking down that road. ATI has chosen to focus completely on the performance segment, less powerful but more bang for the buck. It may sound like ATI threw in the towel even before the fight started, but that's not really true. Instead of doing one big GPU, ATI chose to combine several smaller GPU's through its multi-GPU technology, CrossFireX.
The hours AMD has spent developing CrossFireX will bear fruit with Radeon HD 4870X2. Much like the preceding Radeon HD 3870X2, the coming card uses two identical GPU's on the same circuit board. It's not just the graphics circuits that have been improved since the last launch, but also the communication between the GPU's for even better performance.
ATI will release Radeon HD 4870X2 sometime at the end of August, but already the first previews have been posted, and they are very promising. In games supporting CrossFireX, Radeon HD 4870X2 is without a doubt the fastest card the market has to offer. Sure, it's two GPU's on one PCB, but it's still One Card and it does beat GeForce GTX 280 in games with a working CrossFire profile.
At the same time, the Achilles heal of Radeon HD 4870X2 is that it has two GPUs. In Applications with poor or no support for CrossFire the performance is the same as one GPU, more or less. ATI and the game developers have over a month to fix this though and we're quite excited to see how the card will perform when everything is ready to be officially unleashed. Until then we have gathered some previews for you;
:: Tech Report :: Anandtech :: HardOCP :: Digit-life :: Legitreviews :: DriverHeaven ::
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Radeon HD 4870X2 preview
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