ATI Radeon HD 3870 & 3850: A Return to Competition
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on November 15, 2007 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Obsoleting Products: Radeon HD 3870 vs. 2900 XT
There must be something in the water these days, first NVIDIA makes most of its product line obsolete and now with the Radeon HD 3870 AMD gets rid of any reason to have the 2900 XT.
Our benchmarks show that the cheaper, cooler, quieter Radeon HD 3870 is at worst, the same speed as the poorly received Radeon HD 2900 XT. Granted there are a few areas where the 2900 XT does better, but for the most part it simply can't hold its own against the 3870.
These next two tables summarize things a little better for those of you that are more interested in raw numbers. What you're looking at here is the percentage of 2900 XT performance each one of these cards delivers, first off is the Radeon HD 3870 vs. the 2900 XT:
| 3870: % of Radeon HD 2900 XT Performance | 1280 x 1024 | 1600 x 1200 | 1920 x 1200 | 2560 x 1600 |
| Bioshock | 107% | 106% | 107% | 110% |
| Unreal Tournament 3 | 98.8% | 96.2% | 93.3% | 93.8% |
| ET: Quake Wars | 108% | 117% | 118% | 111% |
| Oblivion | 101% | 103% | 101% | 100% |
| Oblivion (4X AA) | 104% | 103% | 105% | 105% |
| Half Life 2: Episode 2 | 100% | 97.7% | 96.3% | 97.8% |
| World in Conflict | 118% | 120% | 115% | 118% |
| Call of Duty 4 | 136% | 130% | 118% | 102% |
| Crysis | 104% | 104% | 103% | - |
| Average | 110% | 110% | 108% | 106% |
On average, the Radeon HD 3870 gives us a 6 - 10% increase in performance over the more expensive, less featured, louder Radeon HD 2900 XT. Not bad for improvement over the course of 6 months.
| 3850: % of Radeon HD 2900 XT Performance | 1280 x 1024 | 1600 x 1200 | 1920 x 1200 | 2560 x 1600 |
| Bioshock | 90.7% | 91% | 92.9% | 60.1% |
| Unreal Tournament 3 | 92.1% | 86.1% | 80.8% | 77.2% |
| ET: Quake Wars | 107% | 104% | 99.3% | 81.7% |
| Oblivion | 91.1% | 86.4% | 85.8% | 85.4% |
| Oblivion (4X AA) | 92.5% | 89.3% | 89.1% | 83.5% |
| Half Life 2: Episode 2 | 97.4% | 90% | 87.1% | 86.1% |
| World in Conflict | 109% | 108% | 97.4% | 92.9% |
| Call of Duty 4 | 108% | 93.6% | 88.3% | 75.8% |
| Crysis | 93.7% | 91.4% | 89.7% | - |
| Average | 97.9% | 93.2% | 90.1% | 80.3% |
The Radeon HD 3850 comes close in performance to the 2900 XT, especially at lower resolutions, but at ultra high resolutions it delivers only about 80% of the performance of its older brother.
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peldor - Thursday, November 15, 2007 - link
Only if it's a HT+Gaming PC. If it's just a HTPC, a 8600 or 2400 is still lower power and lower noise (with fanless options).semo - Thursday, November 15, 2007 - link
i'm still kicking myself for buying an ati 7500.bryanW1995 - Thursday, November 15, 2007 - link
I must be psychic. I called that about 30 minutes b4 article was posted. Anand must be reading my mind...:)Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, November 15, 2007 - link
Wanna go double or nothing? How do you think Phenom is gonna turn out? ;)Take care,
Anand
chucky2 - Thursday, November 15, 2007 - link
10% improvement over WHAT Anand? Come on, tell us... :)Chuck
Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, November 15, 2007 - link
C'mon Chuck, one AMD launch at a time :)GlassHouse69 - Thursday, November 15, 2007 - link
Nice article :)3870 can run games decently on 1920x1200 resolutions. Being that i dont care about Crysis (oh no! taboo comment!) or xbox360 games on the pc (gears o war), it seems like it could be the card to get..... If the retailers do not price gouge. Waiting for newegg to inflate this one.
It seems that the 3850 is the same card as the 3870 in many ways. Any attempt at oc'ing will be really fascinating. I wonder if 1 Gb of gddr4 will make this card more competitive. even 768 megs would be nice/adequate
Kougar - Thursday, November 15, 2007 - link
Newegg has stock on three HD 3870 cards, all three are priced at $220 right now.DrMrLordX - Thursday, November 15, 2007 - link
I have to ask, was there any antialiasing in these benchmarks? I suspect not but I'd like to hear an answer anyway.The 3850 looks like a good card for overclockers, since it's just a downclocked 3870. At least it's nice to see that the 2900XT and 2900Pro have mostly been rendered obsolete by a cooler, quieter product that can be brought up to snuff with some overclocking.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, November 15, 2007 - link
We included AA numbers with Oblivion (look for Oblivion AA in the graphs). The problem with AA these days is that most newer games don't really run well enough to have AA enabled and quality settings turned up (read: Crysis). While it's not a problem when testing pairs of 8800 GTXes, we felt it wasn't top priority for the more affordable and less powerful cards.That being said, I'll talk it over with Derek and see what we can do for some of our future articles.
Take care,
Anand