Tom's Hardware: ATI Radeon HD 4770 In CrossFire: Unbeatable At $220

[Donnie27]

That's too bad cause the only reason I'd be willing to spend money on 2 ATI cards is the fact that I can play my games 1920x1200 with max AA+AAF. Why else anyone wanna deal with the expenses, heat and the CF driver issues?

Also, from what you are telling, your friend's system seems to having hard time keeping up with the performance level. I don't think what you describe here is a micro suttering issue. Micro suttering should be apparent regardless of the resolution (somebody correct me if I'm wrong).

Maybe! He said it and I trust his views first of all. It's something I looked before buying another 4850. From what I read during my quest for info is that higher settings causes it more. I've NOT experienced it with one card @1600X1050.

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,6...0-X2/Practice/

Since we've tested many games, we can say that micro stuttering occurs in Half-Life 2, Crysis, Race Driver Grid, Need for Speed Carbon, TES4: Oblivion and 3D Mark Vantage. To be fair, we have to admit, it takes such demanding settings to bring the HD 4870 X2 to her knees. But in the future, with new games, the fps will decrease. Not later than that time the problem will rise again, while those who use big screens or those fans of FSAA will have to deal with the problem all the time.

[dr-]

thanks for the link!

no worries! cheers mate!

[ahmad]

Why do you attack something which you have no experience with. Or do you expect someone to believe your argument vs someone who actually ones a dual-gpu setup?

[SamHughe]

Maybe! He said it and I trust his views first of all. It's something I looked before buying another 4850. From what I read during my quest for info is that higher settings causes it more. I've NOT experienced it with one card @1600X1050.

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,6...0-X2/Practice/

Wow! I guess that link answers many of my questions. I wonder if micro suttering is less apparent in two single cards in CF than one 48x0 X2?

[grimREEFER]

that is the site that invented the term microstuttering

[Quadwing]

I love the concept behind CF/SLI, but most games that I own show very little difference between single/dual configurations.

[SNiiPE_DoGG]

I love the concept behind CF/SLI, but most games that I own show very little difference between single/dual configurations.

What do you mean? CF sees real world efficiency near 90% frequently.....

[Chruschef]

i read the title, and just knew this would be a CF & CFx debate.

the 4770 seems to be a real winner, ATi/AMD are really getting their act together it would appear. i could even see myself buying an AMD processor based system in the future at their current rate.

[tajoh111]

From the review, this thing is barely beating the 4890, which can be found for about the same price. It makes more sense to get a 4890 when you consider a few things.

Microstuttering or not, you can almost guarantee that this thing is going to have lower minimum frame rates. Also once you turn on the eye candy and add AA, you can be certain 512 MB of videocard ram is going to be felt.

CF scaling improves with higher resolution which unfortunately is where this solution will not do as well because of the lack of videomemory. Sure its ok with 4x with some of the less strenous games which already have more than playable framerates, but boom when you put in a game like crysis, your getting worse framerates than a single card solution by a significant margin.

Add in that this solution takes four slots up and its simply impractical. Most of these cards have the cheap cooler too, that dumps heat in the case.

Once I went xfire(two double slot cards), I lost my ability to use my dedicated soundcard.

This article comes to a terrible conclusion. The 4890 is a much better product for the above reasons.

The 4770 to me is a half failure. The 4770 had the chance to be the ultimate HTPC single slot card, but this never came to be. It consumes way more power than it should.

Before someone brings up the price to performance ratio, of course it should have a good price to performance ratio. Its 40nm, anything at 40nm should have a great price to performance ratio. Who cares if it beats a 8800gt by 20%, the 8800gt is more than a year old.

[oohms]

To be honest, i much prefer my gtx260 over my old 4870x2. No driver issues, less heat, more consistent performance.

If you want to see micro stuttering, try playing flatout: ultimate carnage. Even with a very decent frame rate, it's still very noticable.

(That said, im still getting 1 or 2 of these to play with)

[generics_user]

call my ignorant but i had no problem at all with my 3870 CF setup

crysis, farcry2, NFS; C&C, CSS all played fine without any problems


the only games where i see a real difference between my new 4870 and the 3870s in CF are Crysis or farcry with AA/AF

CF is great by now, and with enough lanes (x16/x16 2.0) microstuttering isn't a big problem (i have to admit that switching from x38 to P45 made gameplay worse and i had to lower quality on the 3870s with p45)

[Donnie27]

call my ignorant but i had no problem at all with my 3870 CF setup

crysis, farcry2, NFS; C&C, CSS all played fine without any problems


the only games where i see a real difference between my new 4870 and the 3870s in CF are Crysis or farcry with AA/AF

CF is great by now, and with enough lanes (x16/x16 2.0) microstuttering isn't a big problem (i have to admit that switching from x38 to P45 made gameplay worse and i had to lower quality on the 3870s with p45)

You tested two Intel systems, Nawwwwwwww!

Anyway, I agree with the other guy, I'd much rather have ONE 4890 than two 4770s or even over adding another power ungrey 4850! My one slot solution does dump heat in the case but I got two 120 sucking air out so that's not a problem.

Crysis is a bad choice to base anything on since its code sucks a big one. Yes I have Both C and CW, Plus both Farcries, Stalkers, Brothers in Arms and etc.....................the only time I've seen stuttering is during Throttling.

I don't think Video card are stressing two eight X PCI-E slots yet so the 16 X 16 argument is moot! Intel processors on Intel P35/38/43/45/48 have shown themselves being faster on Intel chipsets with only 16 X 4 and 8 X 8 than nVidia's 16 X 16!

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=3506&p=7

We did not notice any difference in game play quality at either resolution between the platforms after playing through several of the levels. Each platform offered a very smooth and fluid gaming experience. We thought the higher minimum frame rates on the Intel systems would be noticeable during the action scenes in the jungle, but we honestly could not tell the systems apart during testing. ............

Adding a second card for CrossFire operation improves average frame rates by 13% and minimum frame rates by 42% for the Phenom II. The Intel Q9550 has an improvement of 24% in average frame rates and 40% in minimum frame rates. The Core i7 average frame rates improve by 24% and minimum rates increase 48%. Overclocking our processors resulted in a 16%~34% average improvement in average frame rates with the Core i7 benefiting the greatest.

[Overgloc]

Ewiz got it for $90!!!
http://www.ewiz.com/detail.php?name=AT-4770_51

[acidpython]

Well i've used a 4870 512mb and a 3870x2 (currently using). And i can notice microstuttering in certain games - Left4dead, Warsow (a quake derrivative) and mirrors edge. Also minfps is a pain CF it's much more problematic with CF to get a "smoother" framerate then with a single card. CF profiles are a hit and miss, most of the time your downloading hotfix's/betas which sorta work/don't work. There are "hacks" for non CF profiled games which can work fairly well.

End of the day if you don't want to worry about the above then get a single GPU solution. Multi GPU is fine, just don't expect it to work how you want it all the time/off the block

[deathman20]

If I was in the market for a card, or if I just wanted to switch my cards out 2x 4770's is where I'd go. Since now they are starting to sell for $90 after rebates. Pretty hard to compete with that for the performance it gives out.

[Donnie27]

If I was in the market for a card, or if I just wanted to switch my cards out 2x 4770's is where I'd go. Since now they are starting to sell for $90 after rebates. Pretty hard to compete with that for the performance it gives out.

So, would one 4770 and one 4850 at least run as fast as two 4770's?

[deathman20]

So, would one 4770 and one 4850 at least run as fast as two 4770's?

The 4850 is a little faster in some aspects from what I've seen but for the most part they are equal.

I'd do it just for the fact that it uses less power than anything else out there and yet it is very damn fast for the price.

I use to have 2x 4850's and those cards where wonderful, since then as you can see im running a GTX285, mainly to help keep the noise down for me, and heat output of the 2x 4850's are greater than my single GTX285. 2x 4770's would be equal or less than the GTX285's power consumption, cooler (in terms of heat output) yet still have the horse poewr that the 2x 4850's had.

[SamHughe]

I use to have 2x 4850's and those cards where wonderful, since then as you can see im running a GTX285, mainly to help keep the noise down for me, and heat output of the 2x 4850's are greater than my single GTX285. 2x 4770's would be equal or less than the GTX285's power consumption, cooler (in terms of heat output) yet still have the horse poewr that the 2x 4850's had.

Have you noticed any microstuttering issue with your 2x4850 setup?

[deathman20]

Have you noticed any microstuttering issue with your 2x4850 setup?

If you want to call driver glitches microstuttering then yes. But if new drivers came out to fix it, I don't call that a ms issue. So in that case no there was no ms issues that I had.

So in other words, no ms issues that I had on my E8400 @ 4.05Ghz with 2x 4850's.

[SamHughe]

If you want to call driver glitches microstuttering then yes. But if new drivers came out to fix it, I don't call that a ms issue. So in that case no there was no ms issues that I had.

So in other words, no ms issues that I had on my E8400 @ 4.05Ghz with 2x 4850's.

k thanks. That's what I wanted to hear.

[Donnie27]

If you want to call driver glitches microstuttering then yes. But if new drivers came out to fix it, I don't call that a ms issue. So in that case no there was no ms issues that I had.

So in other words, no ms issues that I had on my E8400 @ 4.05Ghz with 2x 4850's.

Yeah man, thanks for the info #2!

[003]

Guys, as long as SLI and CFX are still using Alternate Frame Rendering, then micro stuttering will never go away completely. It is inherent with AFR, there isn't anything you can do to fix it at a driver level, other than switching to a different multi GPU rendering mode, most of which perform considerably worse. MS never went away with driver updates. People just got used to it. If you gave them a single GPU that was as fast as their multi GPU setup, the difference would be night and day. And micro stuttering is not subjective. You can measure the latency between frames using Fraps.

There was an article on Anandtech (I think that's where it was) a while back that compared single GPU to 2-way, 3-way and 4-way AFR configurations and measured the latency between frames with Fraps. There was a very stark difference in latency with single GPU vs multi GPU, but for some reason, 4-way AFR by far was the worst, considerably more latency than 2-way and 3-way. I can attest to that having previously owned 2x 4870X2.

[SamHughe]

I can attest to that having previously owned 2x 4870X2.

So you are saying your current setup (4890 CF) runs smoother than your previous setting (2x 4870X2), right?

Honestly, with my current setup, I can play most current games with decent frames @ 1920x1200. I can't add much to this system except a CF since I can't go SLI. I am just debating if it is worth getting two 4890's over a single 285. I like to play my games @ higher res. with AA, AAF on.

[003]

So you are saying your current setup (4890 CF) runs smoother than your previous setting (2x 4870X2), right?

Honestly, with my current setup, I can play most current games with decent frames @ 1920x1200. I can't add much to this system except a CF since I can't go SLI. I am just debating if it is worth getting two 4890's over a single 285. I like to play my games @ higher res. with AA, AAF on.

I actually don't have the cards yet. They will be here Thursday. But, I previously owned GTX280 SLI, and it was much smoother than 2x 4870X2. Compared to a single GTX280, the framerate did feel a bit lower than what was reported by Fraps, but it was nothing like the stuttering I experienced with 2x 4870X2, particularly in UT3 with high levels of AA.

[SNiiPE_DoGG]

the fact of the matter is anytime a single gpu from a CF setup would have dropped below ~15fps on its own the game starts to see major stutter. Personally I'm not sure if its micro stutter or not but it is a result of pushing the card too far. (frame data too large, so and so)

this is why 4770 CF ≠ 4890 among other reasons.

As CF gets better we may see that minimum frame rate of >15 fps per gpu get lower but i dont think this will happen until GPU arch evolves and we begin to see "dual core" gpus