ATI Radeon HD 3850 - first benchmarks!

Posted at: 5:01am 15th November 2007 by Ben Hardwidge

We test ATI's new mid-range graphics chip on Crysis, Unreal Tournament 3, Company of Heroes and a whole load of other games. At £110, is this the bargain of the year?

For that, ATI hopes you’ll go for the more expensive Radeon HD 3870, which comes with 512MB of GDDR4 memory and has a core clock speed of 775MHz. Sapphire plans to sell its 3870 cards for just £150 inc VAT, making them a closer rival to the GeForce 8800 GT. Not only that but we have one in the lab, and we’ll be bringing you the test results later today.

Two’s company

So what has ATI got planned for the high-end? Well, it looks as though this is as fast as ATI’s current generation of GPUs is going to get, but now that the power consumption has been dramatically reduced, the company plans to start introducing dual-GPU cards, which will be called Radeon HD 3870 X2s next year. ATI claims that even a dual-GPU card with the new chips will consume less power than a single Radeon HD 2900 card.

As well as this, there are also two CrossFire connectors on top of the 3800 cards, meaning that four of them could be ganged together in CrossFire configuration with a supporting chipset. This is allowed by the fact that the 3800 cards use the new PCI-E 2 interface, which allows the double the bandwidth of standard PCI-E, but with the same number of lanes. As such, four eight-lane PCI-E 2 slots offer the same bandwidth as four 16-lane standard PCI-E slots. That said, you will also be able to run two Radeon HD 3800 cards in CrossFire configuration on older Intel P965 or 975X chipsets too.

It’s also worth mentioning that ATI has decided that enough is enough when it comes to confusing nomenclature, and has dropped the baffling array of suffixes on the end of GPU model names. Instead, the new Radeon cards will have a simple four-figure model number, where the first digit denotes the generation, the second digit denotes the family and the third and fourth digits denote the variant. Hopefully this will make GPU model numbers simpler to understand; it certainly makes more sense than the various XTs, GTs, GTOs, GTXs and Pros out there.

It’s 0.1 louder

Of course, the other big announcement with the Radeon 3800 series is that it supports DirectX 10.1; the updated API that Microsoft will be including with Vista Service Pack 1. Among the new features of DirectX 10.1 is the ability to have cube map arrays, which ATI says can be used to enable global illumination. According to ATI, the effects of global illumination are of a ‘similar quality to ray tracing, but in a real-time game.’

The company demonstrated this to us with a ping-pong ball demo on a single Radeon HD 3850 card, where a room’s light was calculated with a cube map array, as opposed to using shadow maps and point lights, enabling real-time reflections and shadows of over 5,000 ping-pong balls to be calculated. It’s impressive stuff, though admittedly not nearly as impressive as real time ray tracing. DirectX 10.1 will also standardise anti-aliasing patterns, making for a level playing field in terms of image quality between different GPU manufacturers.