ATi 4870 X2 (R700) thread

[nRollo]

Originally posted by: BFG10K

Originally posted by: nRollo

That Sampsa guy is definitely not "clueless"- if he says microstutter is fixed, there may well be some validity to it. Good news if true.

He might not be clueless but very few people truly understand micro-stutter so it?ll take more than a random internet post showing 2 seconds of gameplay to convince me.

2 seconds is a lot of gameplay BFG....



You're right of course, I inferred by his "more to come" that he was holding back some info.

Would be nice if he's right, some people consider the microstutter a big deal.

 

[bryanW1995]

it's funny how microstutter wasn't discussed much by certain people when 9800gx2 came out but now it's a big issue...hmmm...

 

[ShadowOfMyself]

Originally posted by: bryanW1995
it's funny how microstutter wasn't discussed much by certain people when 9800gx2 came out but now it's a big issue...hmmm...

Truth be told it wasnt discussed when the 3870X2 came out either because people werent aware of it until recently

And to think some have been playing with SLi rigs since it was first implemented with the 6800 cards

 

[LittleNemoNES]

Originally posted by: ShadowOfMyself

Originally posted by: bryanW1995
it's funny how microstutter wasn't discussed much by certain people when 9800gx2 came out but now it's a big issue...hmmm...

Truth be told it wasnt discussed when the 3870X2 came out either because people werent aware of it until recently

And to think some have been playing with SLi rigs since it was first implemented with the 6800 cards

Personally I didn't know what to attribute it to.

I had both SLI & XF in the past and suffered because of them.

NEVER AGAIN!

 

[bryanW1995]

never say never. there's a good chance that nvidia is going to copy amd's strategy for the next round, giving us two different sandwiches from which to choose!

 

[CP5670]

Truth be told it wasnt discussed when the 3870X2 came out either because people werent aware of it until recently

And to think some have been playing with SLi rigs since it was first implemented with the 6800 cards

People have brought it up much earlier (apparent choppiness despite a high framerate) but didn't know what they were seeing. I used to think that it was some kind of additional side effect from the lack of proper vsync and TB.

I mentioned it a few times in early 2006 when I was using SLI, but there was no evidence of it since it doesn't show up in conventional benchmarks. That German site's article a while ago got more people talking about it.

I agree. A lot of people seem to think of 'regular' stutters as 'micro-stutters'. Granted there is no official definition of it, the micro-stutter that occurs in multi-GPU configuration is very different from jerkiness or choppiness. I don't believe I could ever have noticed without learning it first. Multi-GPU configuration can cause more 'regular' stutters than single GPU configuration, but it's not the same as the stutters occuring due to different intervals.

Yeah, the term is probably misleading, as people generally associate "stutter" with the intermittent hiccups due to hard disk thrashing, which microstutter has nothing in common with. It's much more like the frame skipping due to physics desync that occurs in some specific game engines, like the Doom 3 or current NFS engines.

 

[Janooo]

I guess this is the first preview.

 

[n7]

Originally posted by: Janooo
I guess this is the first preview.

Very nice.

But it epic fails in Crysis.

And i hate to say, but i suspect the games they were allowed to test are the ones that cast this card in a good light...i'd expect some crappy results with some other games to come.

 

[waver01]

Originally posted by: n7

Originally posted by: Janooo
I guess this is the first preview.

Very nice.

But it epic fails in Crysis.

And i hate to say, but i suspect the games they were allowed to test are the ones that cast this card in a good light...i'd expect some crappy results with some other games to come.

they used catalyst 8.6 though for some reason. That might influence the results

 

[toslat]

For me, the nice thing is that the 4870X2 is consistently faster than 4870CF

 

[CreasianDevaili]

Originally posted by: toslat
For me, the nice thing is that the 4870X2 is consistently faster than 4870CF

Well to me it looked as if someone who wants to stay on 32-bit OS and games at 1920x1200 the 4870CF is a better bet and less costly when you factor in a new OS+more ram. Also when we factor in the ability to use 3rd party coolers, achieving higher OC with less tempts etc, overall, unless your 2560x1600 I think its a clear cut. That and at 1920x1200 i wasnt seeing the 4870x2 pulling ahead by more than a few fps, nothing notable overall.

If you game at 2560x1600 then you obviously need the 4870x2 2gb.

Overall looks like AMD is segmented pretty nice. Just need the final price.

 

[n7]

Originally posted by: toslat
For me, the nice thing is that the 4870X2 is consistently faster than 4870CF

Yeah, minimum fps is much better too at high rez, which i believe is mainly due to having adequate vRAM.

 

[extra]

Originally posted by: bryanW1995
it's funny how microstutter wasn't discussed much by certain people when 9800gx2 came out but now it's a big issue...hmmm...

I haven't heard it discussed as much of an issue until very very recently. And for good reason. It's simply not really an issue...lol. If it was, people would have been complaining about it for years and years. Instead it's something that bothers a few people and suddenly everyone is like "oh noez!11" about it...

 

[HurleyBird]

Originally posted by: n7

Originally posted by: Janooo
I guess this is the first preview.

Very nice.

But it epic fails in Crysis.

And i hate to say, but i suspect the games they were allowed to test are the ones that cast this card in a good light...i'd expect some crappy results with some other games to come.

From DH forums

We chose the games after testing our entire suite.

 

[taltamir]

Originally posted by: extra

Originally posted by: bryanW1995
it's funny how microstutter wasn't discussed much by certain people when 9800gx2 came out but now it's a big issue...hmmm...

I haven't heard it discussed as much of an issue until very very recently. And for good reason. It's simply not really an issue...lol. If it was, people would have been complaining about it for years and years. Instead it's something that bothers a few people and suddenly everyone is like "oh noez!11" about it...

most people who discuss it say things like "I quit using CF/SLI over an unexplained preceived jitter that did not make sense with the FPS I was getting, its good to know finally what causes it and that I really felt it"

Recently I have experienced micro-stutter on mass effect... on a single GPU (both an 8800GTS 512 and a 4850), which infuriated me, the funny thing is that it is caused by my 3.6ghz E8400 being too slow for the game... It needs a quad core at over 3ghz to stop being CPU limited.

http://forums.anandtech.com/me...=2205375&enterthread=y

So, its not so much that it isn't an issue, but that people dismissed it as the imagination of noobs...

This also reminds me the time I noticed a "dimming" of lights in a room every now and then... everyone told me I was insane... turns out that when a major appliance, say, the washing machine, starts sucking power, the lights all over the house dim slightly. It is amazing how willing people are to dismiss what their own senses tell them.

 

[dasracht]

Originally posted by: Janooo
I guess this is the first preview.

Very impressive results. This is much better than I had expected to see.

I hope the Crysis numbers can be fixed by using newer drivers, however.

 

[GTaudiophile]

R700 Preview @ Anandtech

 

[CP5670]

Recently I have experienced micro-stutter on mass effect... on a single GPU (both an 8800GTS 512 and a 4850), which infuriated me, the funny thing is that it is caused by my 3.6ghz E8400 being too slow for the game... It needs a quad core at over 3ghz to stop being CPU limited.

This is actually most likely an effect of the UE3 frame smoothing. It tends to behave just like microstuttering when the framerate is near the 62fps cap. You should be able to disable the option altogether in the game's ini files.

 

[nib95]

Does anyone know the size measurements of the 4870 X2? Mainly the length.

 

[HurleyBird]

R700 is trading blows with GTX 280 SLI. That's quite amazing.

Anandtech says the board is 1GB and DH says 2GB. Not sure who to believe. Once more previews are out we'll get a better picture.

 

[taltamir]

Originally posted by: CP5670

Recently I have experienced micro-stutter on mass effect... on a single GPU (both an 8800GTS 512 and a 4850), which infuriated me, the funny thing is that it is caused by my 3.6ghz E8400 being too slow for the game... It needs a quad core at over 3ghz to stop being CPU limited.

This is actually most likely an effect of the UE3 frame smoothing. It tends to behave just like microstuttering when the framerate is near the 62fps cap. You should be able to disable the option altogether in the game's ini files.

disabling it increased overall FPS but did not cure the micro-stutter.. which was also noticeable and measureable with fraps on 720x480 resolution (100% CPU use, 20% GPU use, 95FPS max, 65FPS ave, 43FPS min, 23fps instantaneous min during a stutter event 11ms to 41ms to 15ms)...

 

[Cookie Monster]

Power consumption looks way too high. I was hoping to see the idle power draw too. Guess we will have to wait for couple more weeks.

 

[HurleyBird]

From Techreport:

We do know, however, that the two GPUs on the card don't share memory. The board has eight Hynix GDDR5 memory chips per graphics processor, four on the front and another four around back. Those chips are 1Gb each, so each GPU has a total of one gigabyte of memory to call its own. Cumulatively, 4870 X2's effective memory size is still 1GB, since data must be replicated into each GPU's memory space..

Come on Anandtech, saying that R700 had a 2x512MB configuration was sloppy journalism at best.

 

[n7]

HardOCP preview
http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/...wxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==
PC Perspective
http://www.pcper.com/article.p...e=expert&aid=590&pid=2
ExtremeTech
http://www.extremetech.com/art.../0,2845,2325444,00.asp

Just a few more i didn't see linked to yet.

 

[n7]

I think Derek messed up on the AT review...there's no way it's running GRID that well @ 2560x1600 with only 2x512 MB.