Price per performance: what it really means

It was almost two weeks ago that Nvidia launched its G92 based GeForce 8800GT graphics boards into the midrange segment. On the same day Nvidia launched its product to market, we unveiled what Rick Bergman, Vice President of the Graphics Product Group at AMD shared with Tom’s Hardware about the HD 3800 series hardware. The performance of the GeForce 8800GT speaks for itself. It is almost as powerful as its bigger brothers yet offers a current selling price of $280-320 depending on the clock frequencies and features.  Now we get to see AMD’s response on the high end.

AMD's 3800 benchmarks and pics ...

Nvidia has owned the performance space for over a year with single and multi-GPU but this has always come at a premium. Based on forum posts, article comments and the emails we have received, there are some who think that the GeForce 8800GT is a bit expensive. Regardless of your view of “expensive and cheap” the GT opened up high performance gaming to a cost conscience consumer. This is exactly where AMD has targeted its newest graphics product code named RV670. It was reported on TG Daily that AMD would introduce the 3800 series for $180-220 depending on models. This is exactly on target as we were briefed that the 256 MB Radeon HD 3850 will retail for $179 and the 512 MB Radeon HD 3870 will sell for $219.

While marketing will spin off some metric like price per performance, what does that really mean? In essence, true midrange cards give gamers a “graphics card I can afford” yet at a “price I can actually afford.”  This is a very attractive price point. As our preliminary benchmarks will show, it will allow even more gamers to experience high performance graphics within even tighter budgetary constraints.

AMD has not only reduced the GPU size by using a 55 nm process, but has updated its hardware to comply with Microsoft’s DirectX 10.1 specification. A 55 nm process means a lot for several reasons. RV670 requires half the silicon per wafer to produce than Nvidia’s 8800GT. This should translate directly into lower pricing, higher units per wafer (higher volume) and ultimately mean higher margins per wafer.

Traditionally the midrange part was 75% the performance of the high end, but at 50% or less of its price. Looking back in history we see that die shrinks have been a key component of bringing these midrange parts to the masses. This new midrange part offers not only DX 10.1 and a 55 nm process; users will be able to use more cards in two, three and four-way CrossFire will be supported on Vista. Although the driver was not made available to use for launch, AMD stated it will provide this to us in a few days. We have seen this running three times over the past 2 weeks and we told we would have the driver soon to begin testing of our own.

Previously AMD reported that it can beat Nvidia’s thermal envelope. A die shrink means less heat per transistor. In testing we can see that the internal monitoring shows that RV670 is hotter at the die than R600 but this makes sense. Even though it is smaller, it is still going to get hot under operation and there is less surface area to spread heat away from the die. While this temperature reported to Catalyst Control Center is higher than HD 2900XT, you can touch the heatsink with you hand and not get burned.

There is more heat per square inch, but that is easily mitigated by a simple heatsink. Try touching the plastic shroud covering Geforce 8800GT’s heatsink – OUCH! - you will move your hand away fast.  Even though it is quiet, it does run a bit hot.

Whether you use the “hand test” or a thermometer, the implementation of AMD’s mobile technology into the desktop parts is apparent. There are actually three energy states in which the GPU will operate at. The first two we are familiar with, performance with everything turned on and idle with the 3D engine in a down-clocked mode. A new state exists either when the GPU is doing 3D rendering for the Vista desktop or when the shaders are being used for video decoding or other application acceleration. Radeon HD 3800 series will also have an updated Universal Video Decoder (UVD) for the hardware acceleration of HD DVD and BluRay movies.

We are sure you are more interested on how these new cards perform compared to the existing GeForce 8800GT and the Radeon HD 2900XT so we will keep it short and sweet in this article and follow up with another to go over power efficiency at each state, temperature states, video playback and any other intricacy you might like to know about.

Test Setup

We ran the standard benchmarks we have run in the pas,t but included Bioshock and Crysis to see what these loads can do to the new cards. For Bioshock we turned up all of the image quality settings under DX9 (Windows XP) and for Crysis we enabled everything in the game to High. We plan on following up this with additional settings to see AA performance as well as add a couple more games. Since we had limited time before the launch deadline we wanted to encapselate as much performace information within the timeframe of the launch.

Read on the next page: Benchmark results