Posted on Monday, June 30 2008 @ 13:52 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Nordic Hardware
found two photos of ATI's upcoming dual-GPU R700 graphics card which should arrive sometime in late August. The site says this card has several improvements for multi-GPU scaling and heard it should be about 15% faster than Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire.
The card, also been known as R700, has been surrounded by many speculations. The most persistent involve how the two GPUs will communicate. Initial rumors claimed a dual-core approach, which is not true. It's not a Radeon HD 3870X2 remake either. The fact is that it's not just the card that has been optimized for multi-GPU work, but the GPU itself as well. The optimization is mainly for improved scaling though, there's still little known about microstuttering. Numbers close to 80% have been mentioned.
The PLX chip between the GPUs now supports PCIe 2.0, but the exact nature of the remaining changes are yet to be unveiled. The card has two 512MB GDDR5 memory buffers, most likely the same 3.6GHz chips found with Radeon HD 4870. We suspect these won't be shared as so many were hoping.
