So what of a product to compete with the GTX 280? Well that is why we are here today, in the last day or so ATI supplied us with an early sample of the R700 giving us the opportunity to see how it compares to cards which are already on the market. We should however state that ATI have placed some limitations on what we can and cannot say about the R700 at this time and therefore a full outline of the card and performance analysis will be published at a later date.In most benchmarks the card is a lot faster than the GeForce GTX 280 and slightly faster than two Radeon HD 4870 cards in CrossFire but in Crysis the GeForce GTX 280 remained king. Here's a look at how the card compares in Call of Duty 4:
The overclocking performance wasn't really spectacular, the max they could get was an additional 15MHz on the core and 30MHz on the memory but perhaps the final production models will overclock better. The cards also got pretty hot, DriverHeaven says the stock card reached almost 90°C in idle and one of the two GPUs even reached 94°C in load. You can check it out over here. Unfortunately it seems they didn't test if this card has micro-stuttering issues.
The R700 will be available within a month and we've heard it will cost around $549 at launch.