Product review: The AMD Radeon HD 3870 X2 (page 3: Drivers, tests)

Drivers

Implementation inside drivers consists more or less of activating CrossFire while masking this option in order that this technology’s name is not exposed on platforms upon which its functioning with several graphic cards is not authorized. Of course, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 functions on all chipsets, including those from Nvidia which is something we checked.

However, it’s unfortunate that there is no option which allows deactivating the multi-GPU mode. In other words, if there is a problem in a game or application, you won't be able to switch to a "safe" mode. We hope AMD will remedy this by giving us such a choice in the future.

A multi-screen configuration is functional with this card; however, it was impossible to read any HD-DVD in both VC-1 and h.264 as PowerDVD simply displayed a black screen. It’s a rather bothersome bug and we don’t know if the acceleration of HD video playing is actually supported on this product.

Finally, note that with current drivers you cannot yet combine two Radeon HD 3870 X2s but apparently this will change very soon. It will then be possible to have a quad-CrossFire system or combine a Radeon HD 3870 X2 with a single Radeon HD 3870 for a tri-CrossFire configuration.

The tests

In this test, we used ten games, four of which support DirectX 10. Tests were carried out only in 1920x1200 as a lower resolution isn’t generally suited for such a high end product. There was however another reason: a lack of time. In fact, AMD decided to delay the launch the day before it was scheduled and then told us a new driver would fix performance problems. The new driver arrived Friday afternoon before the launch which was scheduled for 6 AM Monday morning which meant having to redo all tests on the AMD cards. Of course they could have had better timing.

Anisotropic filtering and HDR were activated in all cases when available in the game. Finally, transparency/adaptive antialiasing were activated in multisampling mode.

Of course, all updates to Windows Vista relative to performance were installed.

Configuration

Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850
nForce 680i SLI EVGA
2 GB DDR2
Windows Vista
Forceware 169.04 (169.28b for Crysis)
Catalyst 8.1 beta.