Conclusion
After playing second fiddle to the GeForce 8800 GTX and Ultra for nearly a year, AMD is finally back at the high end of the graphics market thanks to the introduction of the Radeon HD 3870 X2. As you just saw in our benchmarks, the card is capable of outperforming the GeForce 8800 Ultra in many cases, but it wasn't a clean sweep for the Radeon 3870 X2. In our testing, the GeForce cards performed better in DX10 apps like Crysis, BioShock, Company of Heroes DX10, and Lost Planet DX10.
In DX9 the tables turned in favor of the Radeon HD 3870 X2: with the exception of Lost Planet DX9 (where CrossFire didn't scale at all), the 3870 X2 outran the GeForce 8800 cards in all of our tests. This included games like Call of Duty 4, Oblivion, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, F.E.A.R., and Company of Heroes with DX9.
If you recall our SLI versus CrossFire tests from last year, you'll remember that DX10 performance was an achilles heel of the Radeon cards in our testing: they put up competitive numbers in DX9 apps, but once a DX10 game was tested, performance began to suffer. At the time we surmised that AMD's DX10 driver was holding them back. It seems like we're seeing this situation repeat itself again in 2008 with the Radeon 3870 X2. While AMD's drivers have certainly made progress and CrossFire is now scaling properly in a wider range of games than they were four months ago, the performance of their DX10 driver is still playing catch up to DX9 – at least that's how it appears based on our testing.
Drivers are going to be the key to the 3870 X2's success. Not only are we looking for a little more performance out of AMD's DX10 driver, CrossFire support is going to be important as well. After all, if games aren't designed to scale properly with CrossFire, the 3870 X2 will essentially perform similarly to a conventional Radeon HD 3870 card like the Sapphire 3870 Atomic we just reviewed. AMD's driver team has been working overtime getting CrossFire to scale with games like BioShock and World in Conflict, but going forward it's going to be critical for the 3870 X2 that these games scale properly with CrossFire out-of-the-box. Missing a game here or there is acceptable, but from August through December last year we saw multiple titles that lacked proper CrossFire support on launch. This situation can't be repeated in 2008 if the Radeon HD 3870 X2 is going to succeed.
With an MSRP of $449, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 is a tempting alternative to the GeForce 8800 GTX and Ultra if you find yourself playing a lot of DX9 apps like Call of Duty 4. In these apps, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 is unquestionably the fastest card on the market right now. But if you're currently playing a mixture of DX9 and DX10 games, you may want to opt for one of the GeForce 8 cards, or wait and see how AMD's DX10 driver matures.
Of course, NVIDIA is expected to launch their latest dual-GPU GX2 card that combines two G92 GPUs onto one board. Of course, we don't know how much the board will cost, but considering the performance that two GeForce 8800 GT cards running in SLI offers today, expect this upcoming GX2 card to be a screamer when it comes to performance…