AMD's Resurgence

The past few months have been a whirlwind in the graphics industry, mostly with the launch of the Radeon 4870 cards. It is quite unfortunate that while Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and AMD (the processor company) all have worked with me in the past, AMD (the GPU company) has flat-out refused to acknowledge me. Thus, not out of spite but out of a need to talk to the people behind the brand, I have always sold parts from NVIDIA as far as GPU's are concerned. This was all fine and good as the GeForce brand was the only card you wanted for the past 3 years, but then AMD brought out some pretty large guns with the 4870, 4870 X2, and most recently the 4870 1GB.

While it is totally impossible to ignore the performance of these cards, I do still have some issues with the testing I have seen thus far. The most recent review I've read was titled "The Card to Get" from Anandtech, and you should read it here. While I totally respect those guys, the issue I have is with the lack of DirectX 10 benchmarks, and a total disrespect for Futuremark. The only DX10 Benchmark in their arsenal is Crysis, and I think we all know that the Cry Engine is a very special beast. Games like Bioshock are missing, along with my personal favorite torture-test, Hellgate: London. Instead we are still seeing games like Oblivion being tested, which at two and a half years old needs to be retired.

The HardOCP guys have a nice round-up of SLI and Crossfire combiniations over here. They brought out 4 games total, again with Crysis being the only DX10 game they looked at. COD4, GRID, and Age of Conan are all DX 9 games. And, of course, no Futuremark scores to look at either.

Luckily, I stumbled upon Hothardware's review while writing this blog post, which can be read over here. Marco did test 3dMark 06 and saw that the GTX 260 roughly equates to the 4870, which is what I would expect. Ditto that in Vantage. The GTX 260 and the GTX 260 Core 216 sit in right next to the 4870 512MB and 1GB cards. I'll let you look at the rest of the results for yourself, but this account has the 4870 1GB card sitting right next to the GTX 260 Core 216 in just about every test. Again, we're missing the DirectX 10 stuff, but atleast we see Vantage show up, which should show us what future games will run like.

So do I think that the fellows at HardOCP and Anandtech are trying to put the 4870 above the GTX 260 unjustly? Not really, but I guess the moral of this story is that any of these cards will deliver seriously impressive performance. I'm going to stick to NVIDIA's products for now, but if you're dying to get a Crossfire machine, let me know and we'll work something out.