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Oh don't get me wrong. I think the 38xx cards are kickass especially for its price point and I don't doubt that the x2 will be the same. In fact I'm looking at putting a 3850 in my HTPC. I'm willing to give it a chance and especially interested in how it performs with official drivers. I've owned ATI cards in the past but as mentioned earlier, I just dont think this will be enough to win me back to ATI, at least not in the highend gaming segment.

I have 3870 in CF... I came from a 7800GT. I really love the ATI image quality. and now after a bout 2 months of hair pulling, I have acceptable performence from my CF setup. (after many hotfixs, patches and waiting for 3 driver revisions). In the first month of owning this setup, I wanted to sell my CF setup for 8800 SLi setup since nothing worked... very frustrating. Now at least things work. however my performance increase is very minimal. 10%-20% on average.

I would warn anyone that thinks about any ATI is you have to wait for the product to mature before actually it being useable as a commercial product. ATI seems to release thier products before they are capable. I mean just look at this 3870X2 delay. almost exactly what i mean. if you bought this in the first month you probably wouldn't be able to run any new games. The technology is great and I still think ATI will win the graphics war with integrated CPU/GPU and modular strategies, but boy do they need to work on thier marketing and commercialization. I am neither a fanboy or a hardcore gamer, I just to have top end stuff and play some games. I don't think the 3870X2 or any newest offering from thier pipeline can cut it.

Another review re-posted, sorry if it already was:

http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/1 [...] index.html

People also shouldnt forget that M$ wont be release any new DX updates , the reson being? Hardware needs to catch up to it. That alone should qualify Crysis as a benchmark . This is just the tip of the iceberg, and hardwares been left behind a little already. Heat issues, looking at nano wiring, theres alot of problems/solutions to be hashed out. We all knew we were heading into a new approach, so get used to it, its not going to change, only your attitudes towards it. Multithreading for cpus, muti die for gpus, its the future

I honestly don't care if it only has half a GPU or 20 GPU's. If it performs better and costs less, then I will go that route. Not sure why that is such a hard concept for some.

image quality (sharpness, color strength) is far superior on 38xx cards, that alone is enough reason for me to stay with ATI for a looong time. performance/price is way better too. i love ATI's new series

that is about the stupidest thing i've heard here for quite a time. that game is simply heavily nvidia optimized

I think your right but I can see where people would be disappointed. ATI in the last year has over promised and hasn't delivered. Its taken over a year for one of there video cards to outperform a G80, which to Nvidia this is now old technology. But maybe ATI isnt as bad of a position as people think. I guess only time will tell and who knows, maybe the R700 will be the real deal.

stoneeh - You replied as if I'm arguing with you. You practically repeated what I just said, read 5 posts up.

We'll let you sleep in and wake you up when AMD and/or Intel come up with a fusion design where two cores in an eight core CPU are both 10% faster at Crysis than an 8800GTX. When will that be? Probably around 2012.

What will happen to Princess Envidia? Her court in Taiwan nixed the idea of her kidnapping Sir Phenominot (at least if you believe the Inquirer). Will she have to develop her own CPU's or just hook up with Burgomeister Cyrix Via? What will the Green Kingdom do when the days of Fusion arrive from both AMD and Intel?

WTF is this "double crap" insanity? ? Yeah whateva n/v fanboy . From initial benchmarks, the x2 ati card (remember it IS a single card) is caning the hell out of the Ultra , never mind the GTX.. (GDI!) As for price.. This will be the main issue in hand. If it's not "added to" to much by e-tailers - Nvid aren't gonna sell any more gtx or ultras . And may just have to get their a=se into gear concerning, not just bringing out the 9800 , but worrying about it's competitiveness . D'ya follow?
Ryan.

To all the people who keep posting that "Oh my god its taken ATI over a year to beat G80 and they need 2 gpu's to do it!"

To you all I say "Oh my god its taken Nvidia over a year to beat G80 and they still havn't done it yet!"

I'm not a fanboy of either side but that is a rubbish argument for a point. Why is Nvidia's response to the 3870X2 the 9800GX2?

Have any of you asked yourselves why is it that there is no G92 refresh of the GTX and Ultra? My guess is that there is little performance left to be gained from the G92 core. The 8800gt has very impressive performance for the price. When the 8800GTS 512 was announced instantly everyone was expecting 8800Ultra trouncing performance, but it just about beats the 8800GTX. Am I the only one who found this a little odd. What it appears like to me is that without a major and costly redesign of the G92 core there is very little performance left to be had. So the obvious stratagy is to put 2 cores together because the single core has nothing left to give.

This isn't specific to Nvidia. What do you think ATI is doing with 3870X2. The RV670 core i.e R600 core has hit its performance limitations. The 3870 is what the 2900xtx was supposed to be. The core design has hits peak. Look at benchies for highly overclocked 3870's and the performance increase is almost non-existant. So put 2 of them together.

Think of it like single and dualcore cpu's. Especially Intels early attempts. They coudn't increase the clocks anymore so they stuck 2 together.

Just think about you know it makes sense.

But, the more I think about it, the less sense it all makes.. (sigh)
Ryan

I was going by the hardspell review, my bad.

The 3870X2 looks promising - Shows the taillights to it's nVidia counterparts often enough to make a clear statement and, given the history, it makes perfect sense to me that improved drivers will make it even better.

For the peeps making Hector comments - please remember that a Phenom doesn't beat it's Intel counterpart (Q66) at much of anything except memory throughput. The Q Overclocks wonderfully, and Intel have a very comfortable number of better CPU's to sell on top of that. ATI's 3870X2 is quite capable of running with, and beating an nVidia 8800GTX Ultra. Win Some, Lose Some. But from what I can see it's always right there and history tells us it'll get better still. So bashing, deserved on the processor side and discussed ad nauseam, is not a valid approach when the topic shifts to Graphics Cards, In My Very Humble Opinion. So this dog *does* hunt.


Personally - Since I have an Intel chipset, I'd like to see a clearly superior ATI card because of the Crossfire option. And the 5~10% improvement even on just the one is nice. I don't see quite enough reason to dump the GPU I have now for one. (20% would be a different story, tho...) But more to the point of a new product: I don't think it's much of a stretch at all for someone with an older card who needed to make the choice *today* to walk right past the 8800's for a 3870X2.

Now, I'm sure that nVidia hasn't stood still either. Though they're clearly milking the GTX/Ultra's for as long as possible. (No, I don't blame them for that - Perfectly valid business practice) So it makes perfect sense to me that nVidia should have a counter~product in it's arsenal. We just haven't seen it yet. Then we'll know.

Until then?

<Looks at overclocked 8800GTX happily purring away in the case>

I think I can afford to take a nap on the subject for a couple months.