New Drivers Cause HD3870 to Beat 8800GT with High RES & AA

[willhub]

I guess its because he started the thread so he can call the shots and if he dont like an opinion then he kicks off I guess.

 

[Fothsn]

I know how to read, what i dont get is, you have 2x 2900's, both run the new drivers, yet only 1x of those cards gets a good boost in frames and an AA improvement from them over the old drivers, the other 2900 doesn't get a boost at all, it stays the same as it did on the old drivers, how ?

I dont quite understand why you call the 3870 a 2900 in every other thread going

 

[willhub]

Because the performance is almost the same and the main arc is still the same.

 

[Cyber-Mav]

I guess its because he started the thread so he can call the shots and if he dont like an opinion then he kicks off I guess.

thats a wrong way to do things man

 

[Cyber-Mav]

I dont quite understand why you call the 3870 a 2900 in every other thread going

2900 got double the memory bandwidth of the 3870, if the core clocks were the same for the 2900 and the 3870 the 2900 shoudl be faster.

 

[lay-z-boy]

The 3870 is a 2900, they are the same architecture, if the 3870 is getting boosted by the drivers, then the 2900 should also.

From your first post in this thread, the 3870 has turned from a separate design, which it is, to a 2900 with a few extras slapped on and a smaller bus, to a 2900 with couple of minor tweaks to now being a 2900.

Seriously, WTF?

And for the other guys, what are you actually debating/arguing over?

 

[Fothsn]

2900 got double the memory bandwidth of the 3870, if the core clocks were the same for the 2900 and the 3870 the 2900 shoudl be faster.

I know looks strange but shows you what the shrink and extra bits did for the 3870.

 

[J.D]

J.D the 3870 hasent had any performance enhancments tho.

It is still not just a die shrink though and that's why I have continued to say this.

It has just a little bit of added performance but hardly noticeable and dependent on the game but memory bandwidth isn't as important in the majority of titles and that's why I think ATI have cut back as did Nvidia in this regard.

Now I do think it could be possible for AMD to raise the level in performances for AA as it's done in a different way and they have had time to work on this issue. I did say "possible" remember . We'll have to wait and see on some benchmarks though to prove if what Soul Rider has posted to be true.

your right in that its not just a die shrink, the number of transistors on die are different compared to the 2900's.

On the ball Mav

 

[LoadsaMoney]

The 3870 is a 2900, its not a seperate design at all, look at the specs of both cards which i linked to, only differences are, 1x is on a smaller process, 1x has a new cooler fitted, and 1x has its bus cut down to 256bit, and 1x is overclocked, adn 1x has had its name changed.

 

[J.D]

The 3870 is a 2900, its not a seperate design at all, look at the specs of both cards which i linked to, only differences are, 1x is on a smaller process, 1x has a new cooler fitted, and 1x has its bus cut down to 256bit, and 1x is overclocked, adn 1x has had its name changed.

OMG Loadsa. Read what you've just written ROFL .

It IS not just a die shrink as that would consist of JUST a core change and is that the case?. No, so please stop it as it's written in stone and no matter what you, me or anyone says it will remain the same.

 

[Soul Rider]

I'm getting ****** because you are accussing me of saying the 3870 is a better card than the 8800GT

I have never said that.

I am getting ****** because in your world where you are all powerful you can off-handedly dismiss the opinion of one of the BIGGEST and MOST trusted review sites, in Europe - and it is the biggest in Germany.

I am getting ******, because you say my comments where intended to start a flame war or make myself look stupid.

No my reason for posting this was to share news of an updated review on a graphics card that I and many other users on this forum have, with other enlightened people who are interested in the world of computer graphics.

Look at the title of the thread - New Drivers Cause HD3870 to Beat 8800GT with High RES & AA

Did I create a title saying - OMGZ NOW 3870 is l337 it better than GT?

No i didn't, but you have turned it into that with your responses, putting words into my mouth. That's what ****** me off.

If I say something, and it's completely stupid or wrong, then I have to suffer that, but having to suffer it because you are making up things and attributing them to me, that I will not put with.

I thought OCUK forums were a place where intelligent people met to have reasoned discussions about a common interest.

Just goes to show how wrong some people can be, I don't think Ive ever made such a big mistake, crediting people with intelligence, what was I thinking?

 

[RavenXXX2]

Never heard of this German website, so it ain't that popular, until i see the mainstream hardware review sites coming out with omgz the 3870 pawns all at high rez with AA, ill be taking that review with a massive amount of salt, all the games are unplayable at the max rez anyway.

 

[Soul Rider]

Never heard of this German website, so it ain't that popular, until i see the mainstream hardware review sites coming out with omgz the 3879 pawns all at high rez with AA, ill be taking that review with a massive amount of salt, all the games are unplayable at the max rez anyway.

Mainstream?

If you were living in Germany this would be the DeFacto mainstream standard website. You don't, probably never bother even glancing at a forum which isn't in english, and if it isn't in english, then by deduction it must be a load of rubbish.

Nothing to do with the fact that they are the first review site in the world to do this, because they often update reviews, to keep people informed of what the situation is now, rather than giving you information that was only valid on release day.

You make a valid point that none are playable at that res anyway, but then, I never said they were. I said as a base for a multi GPU set-up, this shows that single cards can deal with High res and AA, so this SHOULD (not will before anyone starts saying you said this..)mean that when you hook a multi GPU setup to your monster monitor it will be able to play with AA enabled. Only point i'm really trying to make, but all these other posts are detracting from that.

For those people who doubt the integrity of the review site, why look into previous reviews of theirs which can be compared to your trusted sites and see how they compare. If they are similar, then maybe, just maybe, if your review site did the same test, it would be proven. Then you might stop slagging things off and go....


That's an interesting piece of information, which is all this thread was ever supposed to be, an interesting talking point about the high res AA capabilities of these cards, not some stupid slanging match about which is better.

Why do people have argue, why can't they just listen, acknowledge, and then put forward their opinion on it, WITHOUT putting down people who bother to bring this information to our attention (ie the website).

 

[Final8y]

I thought OCUK forums were a place where intelligent people met to have reasoned discussions about a common interest.

Just goes to show how wrong some people can be, I don't think Ive ever made such a big mistake, crediting people with intelligence, what was I thinking?

It used to be, but the few have spoilt it & now i communicate with the many who don't post here anymore through other means.

 

[willhub]

I'm getting ****** because you are accussing me of saying the 3870 is a better card than the 8800GT

I have never said that.

I am getting ****** because in your world where you are all powerful you can off-handedly dismiss the opinion of one of the BIGGEST and MOST trusted review sites, in Europe - and it is the biggest in Germany.

I am getting ******, because you say my comments where intended to start a flame war or make myself look stupid.

No my reason for posting this was to share news of an updated review on a graphics card that I and many other users on this forum have, with other enlightened people who are interested in the world of computer graphics.

Look at the title of the thread - New Drivers Cause HD3870 to Beat 8800GT with High RES & AA

Did I create a title saying - OMGZ NOW 3870 is l337 it better than GT?

No i didn't, but you have turned it into that with your responses, putting words into my mouth. That's what ****** me off.

If I say something, and it's completely stupid or wrong, then I have to suffer that, but having to suffer it because you are making up things and attributing them to me, that I will not put with.

I thought OCUK forums were a place where intelligent people met to have reasoned discussions about a common interest.

Just goes to show how wrong some people can be, I don't think Ive ever made such a big mistake, crediting people with intelligence, what was I thinking?

Well its obviouse a thread with the OP content in is going to start a flame war what do you expect

Everyone wants this forum to be a place with no arguments nothing, just a boring forum to add to the many that allready exist and I think thats just pathetic.

Next time anyone provides any links in foreign like german the obvious thing to do is to give us a TRANSLATED link.

 

[LoadsaMoney]

Look at the new GT/GTS, what are they called, exactly, they are still called 8800's, because thats what they are, they are still over 1x year old tech, the difference being, the 8 series were awesome cards, so no need for Nvidia not to call them 8800's still , as they know they will sell well, the 2900's on the other hand were not, so thats why AMD had to change the names of em, even though they are called 3870's now, they are still the same poor 2900's, but with the name change to 3870 everyone will buy them now as theres nothing to associate them with the 2900's, its crafty marketing thats sucked everyone in, everyone thinks the 3870's aint the 2900's, but they are, AMD's got what they wanted, now their 2900's are selling.

The GT, and new GTS have actual changes to their specs as ive also shown, the 3870 hasn't, its still got the same number of streams, ROPS etc...

 

[Soul Rider]

Well its obviouse a thread with the OP content in is going to start a flame war what do you expect

Everyone wants this forum to be a place with no arguments nothing, just a boring forum to add to the many that allready exist and I think thats just pathetic.

Arguments, NO NEVER. There is no reason to ever argue. Ever.

Discuss and share opinions yes, discuss the validity of an opinion, Yes.

But to outwardly walk into a thread and say

This is all crap, you're wrong this is wrong, etc, that is not how people should treat each other.

What is in the OP content that would start a flame war????

If this post had been New update in windows causes Q6600 to encode 700mb file 1 second quicker, would there be a flame war? No.

I said exactly the same thing, but it was about graphics cards. All you nVidia owners then jumped in shouting FAKE, RUBBISH, GT is still better.

But if you'd actually done some research and read the reviews, you would have seen that the GT is still better, I never said it wasn't, I just said

At high res and AA it beats a GT.

That is not controversial, that is a subject for intelligent debate, unfortunately..

 

[Cyber-Mav]

All you nVidia owners then jumped in shouting FAKE, RUBBISH, GT is still better.

see the thing here is that im an ati card owner.

 

[LoadsaMoney]

Come on lets have a hands up here from all you 3870 owners, would you have still bought the 3870 if it was still called a 2900, im guessing no hands have gone up.

Why have you bought a 3870, why did you not buy a 2900 even though they are the same cards, im guessing your saying, as the 2900's are poor, everyone knows that, exactly, but at the end of the day, you have bought those poor 2900's as AMD have relaunched them under a new name, AMD have done what they set out to do, sell their 2900's.

 

[Soul Rider]

This is for all the people who think it's just a die shrink..

ATI Radeon™ HD 2900 Technology – GPU Specifications
700 million transistors on 80nm HS fabrication process
512-bit 8-channel GDDR3/4 memory interface
Ring Bus Memory Controller
Fully distributed design with 1024-bit internal ring bus for memory reads and writes
Optimized for high performance HDR (High Dynamic Range) rendering at high display resolutions
Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
320 stream processing units
Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
128-bit floating point precision for all operations
Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
Shader instruction and constant caches
Up to 80 texture fetches per clock cycle
Up to 128 textures per pixel
Fully associative multi-level texture cache design
DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs
Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
Early Z test, Re-Z, Z Range optimization, and Fast Z Clear
Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)
Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)
8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing support
Physics processing support
Full support for Microsoft® DirectX® 10.0
Shader Model 4.0
Geometry Shaders
Stream Output
Integer and Bitwise Operations
Alpha to Coverage
Constant Buffers
State Objects
Texture Arrays
Dynamic Geometry Acceleration
High performance vertex cache
Programmable tessellation unit
Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance
Anti-aliasing features
Multi-sample anti-aliasing (up to 8 samples per pixel)
Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality
Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
Temporal anti-aliasing
Gamma correct
Super AA (CrossFire™ configurations only)
All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering
Texture filtering features
2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)
128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
Bicubic filtering
sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support
Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support
CrossFire™ Multi-GPU Technology
Scale up rendering performance and image quality with 2 or more GPUs
Integrated compositing engine
High performance dual channel interconnect
ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform
Two independent display controllers
Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays for each display
Full 30-bit display processing
Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion
Spatial/temporal dithering provides 30-bit color quality on 24-bit and 18-bit displays
High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all display outputs
Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
Fast, glitch-free mode switching
Hardware cursor
Two integrated dual-link DVI display outputs
Each supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600 (dual-link DVI)1
Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content2
Two integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x15361
HDMI output support
Supports all display resolutions up to 1920x10801
Integrated HD audio controller with multi-channel (5.1) AC3 support, enabling a plug-and-play cable-less audio solution
Integrated AMD Xilleon™ HDTV encoder
Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S-video/composite)
Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
Underscan and overscan compensation
HD decode acceleration for H.264/AVC, VC-1, DivX and MPEG-2 video formats
Flawless DVD, HD DVD, and Blu-ray™ playback
Motion compensation and IDCT (Inverse Discrete Cosine Transformation)
HD video processing
Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
Edge enhancement
Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
Bad edit correction
High fidelity gamma correction, color correction, color space conversion, and scaling
MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264/AVC encoding and transcoding
Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
VGA mode support on all display outputs
PCI Express x16 bus interface
OpenGL 2.0 support

VS

ATI Radeon™ HD 3800 Series - GPU Specifications
666 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
256-bit GDDR3/GDDR4 memory interface
Ring Bus Memory Controller
Fully distributed design with 512-bit internal ring bus for memory reads and writes
Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 support
Shader Model 4.1
32-bit floating point texture filtering
Indexed cube map arrays
Independent blend modes per render target
Pixel coverage sample masking
Read/write multi-sample surfaces with shaders
Gather4 texture fetching
Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
320 stream processing units
Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
128-bit floating point precision for all operations
Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
Shader instruction and constant caches
Up to 80 texture fetches per clock cycle
Up to 128 textures per pixel
Fully associative multi-level texture cache design
DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs
Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
Early Z test, Re-Z, Z Range optimization, and Fast Z Clear
Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)
Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)
8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing support
Physics processing support
Dynamic Geometry Acceleration
High performance vertex cache
Programmable tessellation unit
Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance
Anti-aliasing features
Multi-sample anti-aliasing (2, 4, or 8 samples per pixel)
Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality
Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
Temporal anti-aliasing
Gamma correct
Super AA (ATI CrossFire™ configurations only)
All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering
Texture filtering features
2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)
128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
Bicubic filtering
sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support
Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support
OpenGL 2.0 support
ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform
Dedicated unified video decoder (UVD) for H.264/AVC and VC-1 video formats
High definition (HD) playback of both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats
Hardware MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and DivX video decode acceleration
Motion compensation and IDCT
ATI Avivo Video Post Processor
Color space conversion
Chroma subsampling format conversion
Horizontal and vertical scaling
Gamma correction
Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
Detail enhancement
Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
Bad edit correction
Two independent display controllers
Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays for each display
Full 30-bit display processing
Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion
Spatial/temporal dithering provides 30-bit color quality on 24-bit and 18-bit displays
High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all display outputs
Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
Fast, glitch-free mode switching
Hardware cursor
Two integrated dual-link DVI display outputs
Each supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600 (dual-link DVI)2
Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content3
Two integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x15362
DisplayPort output support4
Supports 24- and 30-bit displays at all resolutions up to 2560x16002
HDMI output support
Supports all display resolutions up to 1920x10802
Integrated HD audio controller with multi-channel (5.1) AC3 support, enabling a plug-and-play cable-less audio solution
Integrated AMD Xilleon™ HDTV encoder
Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S-video/composite)
Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
Underscan and overscan compensation
MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264/AVC encoding and transcoding
Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
VGA mode support on all display outputs
ATI PowerPlay™
Advanced power management technology for optimal performance and power savings
Performance-on-Demand
Constantly monitors GPU activity, dynamically adjusting clocks and voltage based on user scenario
Clock and memory speed throttling
Voltage switching
Dynamic clock gating
Central thermal management – on-chip sensor monitors GPU temperature and triggers thermal actions as required
ATI CrossFireX™ Multi-GPU Technology
Scale up rendering performance and image quality with two, three, or four GPUs
Integrated compositing engine
High performance dual channel bridge interconnect1

As you can see, different numbers of transistors, different ring architecture, now including PCI-e 2.0 support, Voltage switching, Dynamic clock gating