ATi Radeon 3870 and 3850 Hands-on

[Third Eye]

Why would Nvidia release a card that performs almost as well as its high-end card but charge only half the price? Demand for the GeForce 8800 GTX wasn't on the decline when Nvidia released the GeForce 8800 GT. In fact, GTX chips were still on allocation, and Nvidia didn't have enough chips to fill customer orders. A company doesn't voluntarily give up hundreds of dollars in profits per unit unless there's a very good reason. Maybe Nvidia figured out that it could make more money by reducing prices and selling more chips. Or maybe AMD spooked Nvidia with rumors of a new line of Radeon GPUs that are half the size of the original Radeon HD 2000 GPUs but just as powerful. Judging by AMD's new ATI Radeon HD 3850 and ATI Radeon HD 3870 graphics processors, we're leaning toward the latter.
The new ATI Radeon HD 3870 and 3850 GPUs are based on an updated Radeon HD 2900 XT design. Both GPUs have all the features first introduced in the Radeon HD 2000 series, including DirectX 10 support, integrated HDMI, a hardware tessellation unit, and a 512-bit internal ring bus. The new chips have the same number of stream processors as the Radeon HD 2900 XT, but are only half the size thanks to a smaller 55nm manufacturing process. The manufacturing improvements will let AMD reduce prices considerably from the Radeon HD 2900 XT's current $399 asking price. AMD aims to have the ATI Radeon HD 3870 512MB available in retail at $219 and the ATI Radeon HD 3850 256MB at $179.




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ATi 3870 performs exactly like ATi 2900 XT and good thing is ATi 3870 will sell for half the price of 2900XT.

[Gigacore]

Great News! Lets wait.. it will get even more cheaper

thanks for the info

[ax3]

ya, more the cheapo ....... good 4 us ........

[bikdel]

things are getting damn cheap.. i guess ATI wont remain underdog for long :-P

more spped at less price and more Overclockability

now im starting to pity 8800 GTX buyers :-P

[goobimama]

Holy! This is nice. With the release of Crysis/COD4/GearsofWar on PC, it gives a lot of reason to go in for one of these. What's the estimated price gonna be out here? 15k or so?

[naveen_reloaded]

Ya good news mate.but hoping for 9 series from nvidia ...heard AMD is not that compatible with some games which are more stable with Nvidia.not sure,but heard this news.
Anyway nice info.will keep in mind when buying a gfx card

[Cool G5]

Great news.

[gxsaurav]

Originally Posted by naveen_reloaded

Ya good news mate.but hoping for 9 series from nvidia ...heard AMD is not that compatible with some games which are more stable with Nvidia.

Wrong news. With DirectX 10 both nVidia & AMD graphics cards support 100% all features of DX 10 equally. The only difference is in how they process the scene

[arun_cool]

what is the price of 3850 in india???

[iMav]

well 1 good point of 3870 over 8800 is that it is 10.1 and 1 bad point over 8800 is that its not as good

[gxsaurav]

The most important thing is that with DX 10 all the graphics cards from all the vendors must support each & every feature, which means that every new generation DX 10 graphics card will only bring more performance & less GPU heat/Power requirment.

DX 10 is here to stay for atleast 5 years, cos there is no need to go for DX 11 before XBOX 3.0. If u get a DX 10 or DX 10.1 based graphics card then u can be sure that u will have all the feature quality wise...& for performance, well....play games at 1024X768, thats all I can say