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AMD doubles up, announces ATI HD Radeon 4850 X2 and 4870 X2
Sure, times might be tough at AMD, but that's not stopping the crew at ATI from gunning for NVIDIA's newest gear -- the company just announced the new HD Radeon 4850 X2 and 4870 X2. Aimed at the "super high-end" of the market, the $399 4850 X2 and $599 4870 X2 feature two GPU chips on a 625 or 750MHz bus, respectively, with up to 2GB of 900MHz GDDR5 RAM. ATI says that there's a 20 percent overhead from pairing up the processors, so the X2s should offer 180 percent of the single GPU cards -- certainly enough to outgun a single NVIDIA GTX 280, and reportedly enough to match a dual-280 setup depending on the game. We'll see for sure when the inevitable flood of benchmarks hits when these bad boys arrive next month -- any gamers out there going to take the plunge?Read - ExtremeTechRead - CNET
ATI demonstrates hybrid-chip CrossFire graphics tech
We've already seen laptops like Sony's Vaio SZ include integrated graphics alongside much more powerful (and power-hungry) dedicated chips, but AMD's looking to make such setups all the more commonplace with new chips capable of hybrid CrossFire. AMD recently demoed the tech to PC Perspective, showing off a 2.2GHz Phenom machine with both unreleased RS780 integrated graphics and a RV620-based card labeled HD Radeon 3450. Running games like Call of Duty 4 and Unreal Tournament 3, frame rates jumped from 30-35fps to around 55fps when hybrid mode was enabled. That's pretty respectable, although the system is limited to speedups of the slowest chip times two, so bigger gains are probably not in the offing. However, there can still be benefits to using chips of drastically different horsepower: the integrated chips can power down the heavy hitter to save power when not needed, and totally switch over when required. That's a pretty solid compromise, we think -- and with AMD aiming for the initial batch of hybrid CrossFire-capable cards to be priced around $50, it looks like we'll be seeing these setups a lot when AMD starts shipping these early next year.
