need2boostpsi
15+ Year Contributor
- 557
- 6
- May 9, 2005
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Mountain home,
Arkansas
Actually, the 3870 is the 2900 on a smaller manufacturing node. With the smaller node comes less power consumption, thus less heat, but also more leakage. Still they were able to up the clocks and make it faster than the 2900series. Still the 3870 lost to the 8800GT 512 on most fronts, especially when AA is enabled as the the 2900 and 3800 series suffered from having to few ROPs. So, while it is a decent card (especially if you got them at a good price), saying its better than the 8800Ultra is a stretch.
AnandTech: ATI Radeon HD 3870 & 3850: A Return to Competition
Only at lower resolutions with AA and AF disabled. But who buys a high end card and lowers the quality.
GPUs use many small "cores" devoted to a specific task. So technically, they are already multicore. Anyway, what resolution do you game at? The 4870X2 is a strange card at low resolutions (anything under 1920x1080), but if you game at a high res, its a good choice that should last a while. However, if your current GPU plays the games you want (which it should play everything at 1680x1050 or lower) with good settings, no sense in upgrading. (Unless you're a nerd like me,)
yeah im guessing your reffering to stream processors
