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PowerColor's ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 card.

(Credit: PowerColor)

The reviews are in for AMD's new high-end 3D card--the embargoed, but not exactly secret 2GB Radeon HD 4870 X2--and the official results are as enthusiastic as the previews. By all accounts, the $550 Radeon HD 4870 X2 is the fastest desktop 3D board on the market, outpacing Nvidia's flagship GeForce GTX 280 card on most tests.

According to the results on PC Perspective, Hot Hardware, ExtremeTech, and Anandtech, AMD's new card comes up faster than both a single $450 GeForce GTX 280 as well as two $250 GeForce GTX 260's. Nvidia may steal a win here and there depending on the settings, such as on Crysis, but at higher resolutions and with more image quality details turned on, the AMD card and its 2GB of fast DDR5 memory the Radeon HD 4870 X2 fares better overall.

You won't really see a benefit from the 4870 X2 unless you play games at 1,920x1,200-pixel resolution or higher. That means unless you own a 24-inch or better LCD, you should probably stick to lower-end cards, at least for the moment. You can also double-up AMD's new card in CrossFire mode (AMD's multicard technology, and competitor to Nvidia's SLI), but that would be hard to justify on anything less than a 30-inch display.

Keep in mind that to see any kind of performance gain, both the graphics drivers and the games themselves need to know how to distribute the workload efficiently across multiple graphics chips. AMD's drivers seem to get along well with current games, but we have no guarantee that that will continue to be the case. Of course, you can't exactly wait for new tests for every title that comes out. And based on the performance the Radeon HD 4870 X2 has shown so far, we think it's a safe bet.

Several new developments in the laptops graphics department from ATI and parent company AMD were announced at this year's Computex show in Taiwan.

To compete with Nvidia's just-announced GeForce 9M series of laptop GPUs, AMD now has the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3800 series. The company says, "The new ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3800 series offers notebook manufacturers the ability to deliver fast graphics performance, energy-efficient 55nm graphics processor technology, amazing video playback, and, for the first time ever, ATI CrossFireX technology for a mobile graphics solution."

You can already get two Nvidia GPUs in select laptops, a setup known as SLI, so we're pleased AMD's version, called CrossFire, is also an option now--but it's the kind of thing only the most extreme laptop gamers would be interested in.

It is worth noting, however, that the new Radeon HD 3800 supports Microsoft's DirectX 10.1--the newest Nvida chips do not. The real-world implications, however, are minor.

Another new development from ATI is called PowerXpress. An evolution of ATI's earlier Hybrid Graphics technology, with PowerXpress you can set your laptop up to use a dedicated graphics card while plugged in, and seamlessly switch over to integrated graphics when you're using the battery, thereby extending battery life. AMD says you can double or even triple battery life this way--but mostly because dedicated graphics cards are such a power drain.

Last but not least, we're finally seeing some real-world progress an a topic of much interest to laptop gamers: the external video card. ATI is calling it XGP (External Graphics Platform) Technology, and you'll need a laptop with a special PCI Express 2.0 port to use it. Basically plug an external box with an ATI graphics card into your laptop, and voila, instant discreet graphics.

But remember, as AMD points out, "ATI XGP Technology requires a notebook equipped with an ATI XGP Technology connector." So you won't be playing Crysis on your Eee PC just yet. Other people will make the actual physical external boxes, and the first one to be announced is the Fujitsu's AMILO Sa 3650.

No word on price of availability yet, so stay tuned for more.

AMD announced today that its next-generation ATI Radeon graphics cards will be the first commercial implementation of GDDR5 memory. According to the company, the new memory will allow for faster, smaller, and cheaper graphics cards:

"The higher data rates supported by GDDR5--up to 5x that of GDDR3 and 4x that of GDDR4--enable more bandwidth over a narrower memory interface, which can translate into superior performance delivered from smaller, more cost-effective chips."

The benefits of GDDR5 memory also include increased accuracy in calculations by way of new error detection mechanisms and more power-efficient graphics cards, according to AMD.

This is all well and good, but without honkin' graphics card that sounds like a vacuum when you fire up Crysis, how will the others at the LAN party know you mean business?

(Source)

AMD-ATI and Nvidia are preparing for the next graphics chip showdown. And there is already a good deal of information (and rumor) on the two chips due in June.

The names of the two upcoming product families have been widely reported: The ATI line is branded as the Radeon HD 4800, while the Nvidia is dubbed the GeForce GTX 200.

Advanced Micro Devices is expected to launch the HD 4850 (price estimates of graphics boards range between $189 and $219) and then follow with the 4870 (estimates range between $199 and $279). In the fourth quarter, AMD plans to add the dual-chip ATI Radeon 4870 X2.

Nvidia will respond with the high-end GeForce GTX 200 family. Initial products will be the GeForce GTX 260 and GTX 280.

VR-Zone has already gotten its hands on some preliminary performance numbers for the HD 4850 and 4870. German-language site Hardware-Infos has posted a table with specifications of the HD 4850 and 4870.

Tech site tg daily said "that card vendors will start printing their boxes next week, which means that the specifications are final at this time."

Less seems to be known about the Nvidia GTX 260 and 280, though a Turkish site is claiming to have all the specifications.

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.

AMD's Spider platform is designed for gaming and multimedia desktops.

(Credit: AMD)

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 the desktop market: gamers who don't have thousands of dollars to spend on the ultra high-end equipment and families who want a powerful home PC without breaking the bank. When combined with the Radeon HD 3850 and 3870 unveiled last Wednesday, you get a pretty decent system for around $900 to $1,200, said Leslie Sobon, director of desktop product marketing for AMD.

For years, AMD disdained a so-called platform approach for its products, preferring to say that unlike Intel's Centrino and Viiv programs, it gave its PC customers a choice of the components they could use to build a system. But PC companies like platforms because they make their lives easier, knowing they can slap components together that have already been tested and validated to work with each other.

In order to get that kind of technology in-house, AMD bought ATI Technologies last year for $5.4 billion. But Spider, which comes out of that mega-acquisition, hits the market at a tough time for desktop PCs and AMD.

The desktop market has been slowly declining in mature economies such as the U.S. and Western Europe for some time. People with that midrange PC budget--$900 to $1,200--have been spending their cash on notebooks over the last couple of years. That's not expected to change anytime soon, and most PC vendors don't terribly mind, since notebooks are more profitable.

But, there's still a lot of investment in equipment used to build desktop PCs, and there's always going to be a class of people who want something fixed and permanent in their homes. The PC industry's response to that trend was to try to find new ways to sell desktops as either gaming machines or multimedia hubs, rather than the general-purpose PC for the home.

For the most part, the multimedia hub strategy has been a spectacular failure: plenty of people have bought Windows Media Center PCs, but few are actually using those PCs in lieu of a cable or satellite receiver and DVR with their living room televisions.

And PC gaming, while still a significant market, is barely holding its own against console gaming. According to NPD, $1.5 billion worth of PC games were sold at U.S. retail stores in 2001. Last year, only $970 million worth of PC games were sold through the same channels--and there are a lot more PCs out in the wild today compared with 2001. Meanwhile, console sales have skyrocketed.

Unfortunately, AMD's greatest strength as a company has historically been PC gamers and enthusiasts. The company arrived as a corporation with the launch of the Opteron server processor, but it has long enjoyed the attention of PC fanboys who crave every last inch of performance they can get.

The hope behind that strategy has always been that PC gamers and enthusiasts are influencers, in that they are the ones whom family members call and ask what they should buy when shopping for a new PC. But I'm not convinced that's as true anymore, simply because PCs are less of a novelty these days than they were in the past.

People are more confident about buying a PC these days, and they have a wealth of options for advice. That means marketing your wares to a general audience is extremely important, and that's an area where AMD simply does not play.

Intel dominates the marketing of the PC industry. The Intel Inside program was a masterstroke, and years ahead of its time. AMD has no suitable equivalent, mainly because marketing to the general public is expensive. "We're not sitting here with billions of dollars of marketing to push one chip or another, we rely on our customers (the PC companies) to do the end user marketing," Sobon said.

AMD still does pretty well at retail without that kind of marketing effort. In October, AMD had about 45 percent of the U.S. retail market, according to CurrentAnalysisWest. That number also doesn't include Dell, which has made AMD a significant part of its product lineup. Most of that share, however, is made up of desktops, which are a shrinking market and less profitable to boot.

The initial plan for Spider is to launch it through channel partners, rather than top-tier PC companies like Hewlett-Packard and Dell. Falcon Northwest and Velocity Micro are well-known names among the PC gaming community, but they are boutique players in the market at large. And the other vendors in AMD's launch plans? iBuypower and Cyberpower, two companies that aren't exactly on the lips of most PC buyers.

This is the perennial problem for AMD. It can't reach a wider group of buyers in the more profitable segments of the market without the combination of great products and a steady marketing campaign. After Intel's product teams pulled their collective head out of the sand in 2006, the competitive comparisons were much less in AMD's favor.

This is a really tough period for AMD. It's having trouble getting faster versions of Barcelona, the chip it desperately needs to fund the rest of its operation, out the door. The Spider platform is launching into a segment that is changing rapidly, and through partners that won't produce volume. Puma, a revamped notebook processor, is still months away.

And perhaps most troubling, AMD recently canceled a meeting of industry analysts to talk about its future roadmap. CEO Hector Ruiz has done a lot of good for AMD, validating the company as a true industry player with the success of Opteron, but he'll ultimately be judged on whether the $5.4 billion gamble on ATI will pay off in the form of the Fusion products expected in 2009. Right now, that's far from certain.

Correction: This post initially misstated the brand of the two processors that launched Monday. They are Phenom processors.

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 Radeon HD 3850 finally delivers presentable, current 3D gaming for less than $200

(Credit: AMD)

The new ATI cards are unique in that they offer support for a few new hardware and software features. They're both PCI Express 2.0 compatible, which means a fatter graphics data pipe when they're paired with a motherboard that has a PCI Express 2.0 slot, due from ATI shortly. That kind of throughput isn't quite necessary yet, because no games are really pumping that much data through, but it's nice to have the hardware support in place for when they might. Another benefit of the newer motherboards will be CrossFireX, a new iteration of ATI's multicard technology that lets you match up to four different cards in one system.

Similar to PCI Express 2.0, though perhaps less important, the new Radeons are also DirectX 10.1-compliant. That update to the still-emerging DirectX standard might eventually allow for a few additional graphical bells and whistles. But no developer in his right mind will require you to have DirectX 10.1 hardware, especially when DirectX 10 is still in the early adoption phase. DX10.1 compatibility is more valuable today as a marketing bullet point than an actual feature.

For performance, the $179 256MB Radeon 3850 overtakes against Nvidia's 8600 GT, and the $219 512MB Radeon 3870 effectively replaces ATI's older Radeon HD 2900 XT, which is basically as fast, but it costs $399. According to GameSpot's tests and others from around the Web, neither card is as fast as the newer GeForce 8800 GT from Nvidia, but the lowest price we've seen on that card is $270, making the Radeons into major bang-for-the-buck players. We would still expect all of the sub-$400 or so cards to choke on newer games in DirectX 10-mode and with the details cranked, but the good news is that DirectX 10 hasn't distanced itself enough from DirectX 9 yet to make that much of a difference in image quality. So with these new ATI cards, you can dial down the settings, still have your game look great, and enjoy smooth frame rates on most, if not all current titles and not break the bank to do it. We'll have a full review of the 3850 up shortly, so stay tuned.

Asus may be best known for making laptops that are sold under other brand names (we're looking at you, MacBook), but the Taiwan-based company is also frequently the first out of the gate with new technology. For a good example, check out the SideShow-enabled laptop we saw recently at CES.

Asus today announced the first notebook to feature graphics from ATI's new ATI Mobility Radeon X2300 chip. The Asus A8Jr isn't terribly remarkable otherwise, but since ATI isn't saying much of anything about the X2300 just yet, informational nuggets such as the following (from the Asus press release) are illuminating:

"The new ATI Mobility Radeon X2300 will boost graphical performance, and utilize ATI's HyperMemory memory management technology to deliver enhanced 'performance-per-watt' operations. It will also offer Certified for Windows Vista 3D graphics that supports the visually stunning Windows Aero user interface."

OK, it's really not that illuminating, but since the street date and price on the Asus A8Jr are still up in the air, we'll take what we can get. ATI has mentioned the Mobility Radeon X2300 in passing before but has not officially announced it yet.