Intro, Specifications and Related Info





AMD hasn't exactly kept the product we're going to be showing you here today a secret. Once NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX 200 series, and AMD had a look at what the cards could do first hand, AMD's marketing machine was tuned up and revved to its redline expunging the features and benefits of their upcoming GPU. Then, when the initial products in the Radeon HD 4800 series launched, AMD's plan became quite clear.



The Radeon HD 4800 series didn't overwhelm NVIDIA's GTX 200 series with raw performance. In fact, the GeForce GTX 280 and 9800 GX2 were more powerful than the Radeon HD 4870. The Radeon HD 4800 series cards, however, were still excellent cards and they were offered at extremely competitive prices, which put significant pressure on NVIDA. At the time of their launch, the Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon HD 4870 were both less expensive and more powerful than the GeForce 9800 GTX and GeForce GTX 260, respectively. Since then, NVIDIA has reacted with a quick round of price cuts.



While enthusiasts were contemplating the purchase of a new Radeon or GeForce, AMD then planted another seed and released some concrete details regarding the Radeon HD 4870 X2, as if to say, "Yeah, we've got you covered at the $300 price point and a new, ultra powerful behemoth is coming real soon too. Maybe you should hold onto your upgrade money for a bit?"



That behemoth is the Radeon HD 4870 X2. As its name suggests, the card features two RV770 GPUs running in tandem, for what is effectively a Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire configuration on a single PCB. Other than its pair of GPUs, however, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 has a few more differentiating factors we'll need to tell you about. Read on for the full scoop...







ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 Cards (Codename R700)

AMD ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series Specifications and Features

956 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process

PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface

256-bit GDDR3/GDDR5 memory interface

Microsoft DirectX 10.1 support Shader Model 4.1 32-bit floating point texture filtering Indexed cube map arrays Independent blend modes per render target Pixel coverage sample masking Read/write multi-sample surfaces with shaders Gather4 texture fetching

Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture 800 stream processing units Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors 128-bit floating point precision for all operations Command processor for reduced CPU overhead Shader instruction and constant caches Up to 160 texture fetches per clock cycle Up to 128 textures per pixel Fully associative multi-level texture cache design DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192) Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer Early Z test, Re-Z, Z Range optimization, and Fast Z Clear Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1) Lossless color compression (up to 8:1) 8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing support Physics processing support

Dynamic Geometry Acceleration High performance vertex cache Programmable tessellation unit Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance

Anti-aliasing features Multi-sample anti-aliasing (2, 4 or 8 samples per pixel) Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling Gamma correct Super AA (ATI CrossFireX configurations only) All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering

Texture filtering features 2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel) 128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma) Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF) Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support

OpenGL 2.0 support ATI PowerPlay Advanced power management technology for optimal performance and power savings

Performance-on-Demand Constantly monitors GPU activity, dynamically adjusting clocks and voltage based on user scenario Clock and memory speed throttling Voltage switching Dynamic clock gating

Central thermal management – on-chip sensor monitors GPU temperature and triggers thermal actions as required ATI Avivo HD Video and Display Platform 2nd generation Unified Video Decoder (UVD 2) Enabling hardware decode acceleration of H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2 Dual stream playback (or Picture-in-picture)

Hardware MPEG-1, and DivX video decode acceleration Motion compensation and IDCT

ATI Avivo Video Post Processor New enhanced DVD upconversion to HD new! New automatic and dynamic contrast adjustment new! Color space conversion Chroma subsampling format conversion Horizontal and vertical scaling Gamma correction Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing De-blocking and noise reduction filtering Detail enhancement Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction) Bad edit correction Full score in HQV (SD) and HQV (HD) video quality benchmarks

Two independent display controllers Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays for each display Full 30-bit display processing Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion Spatial/temporal dithering provides 30-bit color quality on 24-bit and 18-bit displays High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all display outputs Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays Fast, glitch-free mode switching Hardware cursor

Two integrated DVI display outputs Primary supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600 (dual-link DVI) Secondary supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI only)3 Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content4

Two integrated 400MHz 30-bit RAMDACs Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x15363

DisplayPort output support Supports 24- and 30-bit displays at all resolutions up to 2560x16003

HDMI output support Supports all display resolutions up to 1920x10803 Integrated HD audio controller with up to 2 channel 48 kHz stereo or multi-channel (7.1) AC3 enabling a plug-and-play cable-less audio solution

Integrated AMD Xilleon HDTV encoder Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S-video/composite) Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions Underscan and overscan compensation MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264/AVC encoding and transcoding Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time VGA mode support on all display outputs

ATI CrossFireX Multi-GPU Technology Scale up rendering performance and image quality with two GPUs Integrated compositing engine High performance dual channel bridge interconnect



As the above list of specifications and features show, the new Radeon HD 4870 X2 has the exact same features as the Radeon HD 4870; it just has two GPUs. Like the other members of the Radeon HD 4800 series, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 offers DX10.1 and Shader Model 4.1 support, the GPUs are manufactured on TSMC's 55nm process node, and both support ATI's CrossFireX multi-GPU technology.



Because we've covered essentially all of the shared features of the Radeon HD 4800 and 3800 series cards before, we won't be going into them in depth again here. However, we would recommend taking a look at a few recent articles to brush up on the tech if you're so inclined.