Double-Chip Graphix Card For Gamers

Advanced Micro Devices on Monday launched for PC gamers a two-chip

graphics card that it hopes will give it a lead in price and performance over
rival Nvidia.

The ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 combines two graphics processors on a single

board, giving it nearly double the performance of the single-chip Radeon HD
3870 introduced in November 2007, according to AMD. The latest graphics
card tops a Teraflop, or 1 trillion floating point operations per second, which
is the equivalent of a trillion mathematical calculations per second.

High-end graphics cards target hardcore gamers looking for realism in 3-D
effects used in many videogames today. To get peak performance, game
enthusiasts will use multiple graphics cards and use software tools to boost
the clock speed of CPUs.

AMD's latest product would compete with Nvidia's GeForce 8800 Ultra that
starts at $630. The Radeon HD 3870 X2 has a suggested retail price of
$449.
AMD's new graphics card will also support the company's CrossFire X
technology, which makes it possible to use up to four cards on a single
computer to further boost performance. CrossFire X competes with Nvidia's
scalable link interface, or SLI. AMD plans to release software to enable
CrossFire X support for the HD 3870 X2 late in the current quarter.

Market researcher Jon Peddie, head of Jon Peddie Research, said AMD's
new card is 70% faster than the single-chip HD 3870, making the new
product faster than having two separate cards on a motherboard, which only
increases performance by 50%.

With the card comparable in performance to Nvidia's highest end product,

but selling for substantially less, the new card places AMD ahead of its rival,
Peddie said. Nvidia, however, is likely to respond quickly to the competition.

"Now that they know what AMD has accomplished, Nvidia will go crazy trying
to beat them," Peddie said. "AMD is king of the hill in price and performance
for now, but the question is how long will they stay there."

Graphics performance is becoming increasingly important in entertainment

PCs offered by manufacturers as consumers store and manage a growing
number of video, audio, and picture files. To boost the performance of low-
to mid-priced PCs, AMD and Nvidia are offering inexpensive graphics cards
that work in conjunction with the companies' integrated graphics circuits
embedded in motherboards. In the past, the integrated circuits would shut
down and let the graphics card do the processing.

AMD's ATI Radeon HD 3400 series graphics card, for example, can
complement the company's integrated chipset. The card has a suggested
retail price of $49 to $65.

Nvidia introduced similar technology for its own integrated chipset. Called
Hybrid SLI, the technology was introduced at the Consumer Electronics
Show in Las Vegas this month, and will be available in all graphics cards
starting with the GeForce 8200.