Al_Vampyre

Excellent work guys, if I didn't already own an 8800GTX this card would be on my list!

Once the driver for CrossfireX is out it'll be interesting to see what 2 of these babies can do, it would appear that crossfire is a much more robust and scaleable solution than SLI so it should be good!

mike2h

thx for all the work!
as stated previously, this card should get much better with mature drivers.
amd(& us) would be better served by amd coming out with a kickass single gpu solution. that aside, i would definetly consider this card for my next upgrade.
bty, will the 'min fps issue' become worse in crossfire? going by amd's explanation this would seem to be the case. if so, has anybody seen this issue in sli?
fwiw, i havent notived this issue on gx2. doesnt mean it aint happening, just that i have not noticed it.

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brutusmaximus

I think you mean quadfire? the card is already running in crossfire really, just internally rather than a dual PCIe solution. It wouldnt happen in SLI or standard crossfire as you would have two seperate cards running via the PCIe lanes in a motherboard solution. It is just a failing of this particular single card solution. I am sure it won't really be much of an issue really, it just might rear its ugly head from time to time.

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ChaosMinionX

Awesome review guys, its good to see ATI is back in the running, and that 2 GPUs on 1 PCB became a reality

Cant wait for mine to arrive.

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cozumel

Another excellent review. DH should commend itself as well as ATI as it was a good piece of collaborative teamwork that helped ATI address the driver issues. Well done DH.

Edit: You have now have another digg in honor lol

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Zardon

Thanks for the words of support today guys, much appreciated. Also be sure to check out the other reviews, we posted quite a few in the news today. I was a little disappointed with Hardocp and their stance today on their front page, stating that apparently everyone else is using "canned" benchmarks and they are the only ones who aren't.

We haven't been using premade benchmark scripts for a very long time (we also dropped 3dmark in reviews before hardocp did), stuart uses real game play. This is in fact how we noticed the minimum frame per second issue we noted (page 17 of the review), I don't think anyone else has even covered this in detail, take from that what you will! Not only that but we managed to get a statement direct from AMD explaining why. We have spent the last week working with AMD on the drivers, so I think its pretty fair to say we know what we are talking about.

That said, id rather not dwell on this, I hope our review has been informative, entertaining and educational.

Blacklash

Good review.

I am going to try one myself. It's on the way from Newegg. Will they be making the drivers you used to test available soon? Currently I have the regular 8.1s installed.

I guess I'll try it in my Q6600 G-0 rig first because that CPU is well overclocked and will likely give it solid support.

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Alex

I wouldnt worry about it Zardon, Im a long time reader of Hardocp but you really do have to take Kyle with a pinch of salt. The reviews at Hardocp are good, however my personal take is that they tend to like controversy and to ram down peoples throats they are 150% unbiased and are a little bit smarter than everyone else. I was here when you guys dropped the synethic 3dmark in reviews and about 2 weeks later Hardocp did the same.

I think this review today on Driverheaven shows one thing however, that Hardocp are lately lacking. DH is a superior hardware review site and has been for a good 6 months - I wouldn't have said that this time last year.

Kudos guys, this is the most unbiased review showing the strengths and weaknesses of the card on all levels. The word is spreading, ive noticed a lot of people think the same thing on all the tech sites today.

psuedoanomaly

I read the review, I'm not sure if I missed some details but how are you benching these games?

Alex

eh? did you read the test system page? there are details on drivers, hardware, testing procedures. everything.

geraldmango

The test system page shows the metholodogy and all the hardware and software used. Every game page also has pictures of the game settings and BMP format IQ images. Real time testing is used and every test is ran 3 times on every card and averages used, not synt pre made benchmarks. Thats how DH spotted the minimum frame rate issues that were detailed on page 17. If it wasn't for DH, all the reviews would have the old crappy drivers, it was DH who got AMD to postpone NDA for a week ! Not a common fact on the net as other hardware sites seem to be deliberately ignoring it. Guess they are maybe a bit worried that DH are too much on the ball lately.

man I just read the front page post that kyle put up on Hardocp. What a tool. DH finds driver issues, gets AMD to delay the card being released and helps to make the drivers better. Then due to testing they notice a hardware problem with minimum frame rates and get a response from AMD!

What exactly did hardocp do? yeah, the usual, just slag everyone else off, while putting up a substandard article.

psuedoanomaly

You mean the paragraph on the first page about good benchmarking practices?

That paragraph vaguely explains how these games were benchmarked, afaik cutscenes, timedemos, built in benchmarks and scripts could have been used to bench these games.

Zardon

I take it you aren't a regular, so ill break it down. We use real game play to test graphics cards, we have done so for a long time. if we used pre built benchmarks or time demos we wouldn't have found the minimum frame rate issue as the majority of sites who used these still haven't even found the issue. This is only seen with extended gameplay, or what id like to call "real life" gameplay. We play games for hours behind the scenes with new cards before we even start benchmarking. This is the best way to find or note anything unusual before we get into the indepth review testing. This is how we found issues that caused AMD to delay their NDA for a week. Issues we helped solve.

if you would like anything else explained please ask away.

Veridian3

Every single test in the review used real gameplay... i can confirm that as i was the one who tested the cards and wrote the article. We/I havent used timedemos, or built in benchmarks for years, and have never benched a cutscene in my life.

brutusmaximus

Hey Zardon looks like Kyle at Hardocp has retracted the insult when he said that everyone else used canned benchmarks. Seems it was the news guy Steve. Seems a bit mean of Kyle to be passing the blame to him entirely, its partly his own fault for not checking on front page postings especially on such an important article.

[H]ard|Forum - View Single Post - ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 @ [H]

Man those Hardocp forums are a nasty place!

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