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A week after it was supposed to, AMD announced its Radeon HD 3870 X2 graphics card today. Roughly $450 will get you this high-end 3D card, which melds two Radeon HD 3870 chips onto a single 3D card package. The resulting performance is basically the same as two standalone Radeon HD 3870 cards in AMD's multicard ATI Crossfire mode. Various review sites show it competing more or less well against Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GTX and 8800 Ultra cards, although neither AMD nor Nvidia can claim an across-the-board victory.

Our illustrious colleagues at GameSpot are working diligently on updating their benchmarks for this card after a late-breaking driver update (the reason for the cancellation of last Monday's announcement). We weren't originally going to retest, but for reasons unrelated to the driver, we decided we would. Once we have scores, both CNET and Gamespot will post our respective reviews. In the meantime, Anandtech, ExtremeTech, and PC Perspective have well-done coverage of AMD's new card. And how do those sites find the DirectX 10 performance picture?… Read more

AMD's new Radeon HD 3400 and 3600 graphics cards represent the complete opposite end of the spectrum from the 3870 X2 whose benchmark results and technical details we're not allowed to discuss until later. Where the 3870 X2 is...something else, the 3400 and the 3600 sit firmly on the budget side of the aisle.

The 3400 will feature card variants ranging from $50 to $65 or so, and the 3600's will go from $80 to $100. Neither version will deliver top-line 3D performance, but they will each give you a step up in speed over an … Read more

We saw a story on ATI's new Radeon HD 3870 X2 3D graphics card and its delayed launch on the Inquirer this morning before we got into the office. Once we got into the office we were able to confirm the situation for ourselves. The nondisclosure agreement we signed precludes us from revealing what it is we're unable to confirm, exactly. Instead, we'll simply say that the shifty date-maneuvering discussed in the Inquirer piece seems to happen more often than not with the graphics and CPU vendors and their product releases.

Both major graphics chip vendors are taking the covers off of new technologies that let you use multiple graphics chips.

Advanced Micro Devices showed CNET Reviews its ATI Hybrid Crossfire design the other day, and various previews of Nvidia's new 3-way SLI popped up around the Web as well. The two takes on multichip graphics processing couldn't be more different from each other, and each reflects where their respective vendor seems to be throwing much of its energy lately.

Being populists, we're most excited by Hybrid Crossfire design. When supporting motherboards and systems come out next year, … Read more

The first major fruits of Advanced Micro Devices' acquisition of ATI Technologies are ready for the public just as the market for those products is going through some profound changes.

Spider will be AMD's first "platform" product when it makes its expected debut Monday. It is designed for desktop PCs, and the entire Spider package comes with a new processor, AMD's quad-core Phenom chip, the new 7-series chipsets, and new graphics chips.

The two Phenom processors launching Monday are essentially desktop versions of AMD's Barcelona quad-core processors. They're designed for the upper half of … Read more

Both ATI's and Nvidia's first round of $125 to $200 DirectX 10-cards delivered underwhelming performance at best. They couldn't handle games from last year, let alone crank through newer titles like Crysis and PC Gears of War. But with Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GT and ATI's new Radeon HD 3850 and 3870 cards (announced today) mainstream gamers can finally get a piece of that modern game action for less than the price of a full-fledged game console.

The new ATI cards are unique in that they offer support for a few new hardware and software features. … Read more

AMD's upcoming FireStream processor might be a way for scientists to tap into a lot of performance without breaking the bank.

The company will be demonstrating its FireStream 9170 processor next week at the SC07 supercomputing show, and executives spoke this week about the promise of "stream computing." The 9170 is designed to let high-performance computing applications take advantage of the excellent parallel performance of a graphics chip.

The big trend in chip design over the past few years has been parallelism. Instead of trying to crunch all the data through a single path moving as fast … Read more

As rival AMD was preparing to snap up graphics chipmaker ATI Technologies, Intel was considering topping AMD's offer or going after Nvidia, according to one of the company's top executives.

In an interview with The Inquirer, Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's digital enterprise group, said Intel looked "pretty closely" at making a play for Nvidia or ATI, the two largest graphics chip companies in the world. Obviously, that never happened, as AMD closed its acquisition of ATI last year and Nvidia continues on as a standalone company.

Intel had some … Read more

BestBuy.com lists six Visiontex-branded ATI TV Wonder products today, including the never before seen ATI TV Wonder 650 Combo USB external ATSC/NTSC TV tuner. The others are merely reboxings of various 600 and 650 tuners on the market, ranging from a USB key-size model to two full PCI Express cards (excepting, of course, the CableCard-based TV Wonder Digital Cable Tuner, which remains a PC vendor bundle exclusive).

All of these tuners support (as federally mandated) both analog and digital signals, and both the new $149 TV Wonder 650 Combo USB and the $129 TV Wonder 650 Combo PCI … Read more