AMD versus NVIDIA, 4870 X2 Edition

AMD let loose the 4870 X2 today, which is arguably the fastest single card GPU on the planet now. I say arguably, much to the lament of my readers, simply because this card requires drivers to get that crown. The X2 is comprised of two GPUs in a Crossfire situation, and as we should all know, Crossfire requires profiles for each application it accelerates. This means that today's launch, with today's latest un-released drivers, showed excellent performance across the board, besting the best that NVIDIA has to offer in a single x16 PCIe slot. However, when Fallout 3 is released, you may not have performance for a couple weeks while AMD sorts out their drivers.

About a year ago, NVIDIA created a default SLI profile using AFR for any game or application that didn't fit it's current list of applications. This means that you have a 50-50 chance of instant performance when Fallout 3 launches. Sometimes it is slower, but then you just disable SLI and wait for the new drivers. A 50% chance isn't great, but it's better than the big goose egg on the other side of the fence.

Ever since SLI was launched, I've always viewed it and Crossfire as good upgrade paths, but never a good investment out the door. That's why you'll only see 2 GPUs in Odin, while Thor and Njord SLI are SLI-Ready as an upgrade path. 

That said, the industry moved quite a bit in the past couple of years behind the scenes. NVIDIA's "The Way It's Meant To Be Played" movement has attracted just about every developer on the planet, minus Blizzard and Valve. When NVIDIA purchased Ageia for PhysX, more than a few of these developers also jumped on board with that. You can see a full list of current games here, with many more in development.

This week, NVIDIA will launch drivers that allow PhysX acceleration on GPUs, and I've seen this first hand with my 8800GT. With some titles, the minimum frame rates balance out with the averages, while in some situations like 3DMark Vantage's Physics test, we've seen a 9x increase in power. Add in the fact that a $80 9500GT will run as both a secondary GPU and a PhysX accelerator, and we've got a pretty good case for the green camp.

I know this will be a touchy subject, but I think you'll enjoy the next round of updates for the Nordic PC line-up, coming this week to a nordic-pc.com near you.