AMD ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 Review

While the Radeon HD 3870 X2 has the potential to become one of, if not the fastest graphics cards released to date, it's not something that I can recommend over Nvidia's current flagship GeForce 8800 Ultra and 8800 GTX cards because it's only as strong as its weakest link. Sadly for AMD's graphics product group, that means there's a long road ahead with driver support for this beast because, even from just looking at current releases, I believe there will be scenarios in the future where CrossFire isn't as well supported as it probably should be.

There are many ways to look at this and I'm sure the conspiracy theorists are hard at work. Are the developers locking AMD out because they're working closely with Intel's and Nvidia's developer relations teams? Is AMD's developer relations team helping developers to implement proper CrossFire support? Or is there something else that I've missed completely? I honestly don't know what the situation is, but there are developers which I've spoken to in confidence that //haven't heard from AMD for a while.

Ultimately, the long term success of this card is going to come down to AMD's driver and developer relations teams and how well it gets supported in this year's crop of new releases. I'm all for faster graphics cards using multiple GPUs, but there needs to be transparency for the gamer to really harness a multi-GPU card's potential. In the scenarios where the support is there, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 performs very well and it can be looked upon as a match for Nvidia's now nine-month old GeForce 8800 Ultra, but in the scenarios where there isn't support, you end up with a card that isn't even as fast as something that's nearly half the price.