This fall has already turned out to be one of the best times to be a PC gamer. A new wave of competitively priced and powerful graphics cards is hitting the market and a slew of great PC titles have already started their onslaught onto shelves and into our free time. If you were wondering when would be a good time to stick the proverbial tongue out at your console gaming buddies, that would be now. Of course, as PC gamers know, the stigma of gaming on this platform is the need to upgrade. Fair enough, but most of us have fun doing it. With games like Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3 already in your collection many of you will find your system lacking in the GPU area. - PC Perspective

AMD Radeon HD 3870 and 3850 Video Board Review

In its most simple form, the new RV670 architecture is a die-shrink of the R600 architecture we saw released earlier in the year as the Radeon HD 2900 series graphics cards. The changes in the GPU go further than that of course, as we saw with NVIDIA's G92 revision of their G80 architecture, and we will dive into those alterations below. The most important change is the move from a problematic 80nm process technology to a new 55nm process. The move from 80nm to 55nm technology is saving AMD where it really matters today, in the pocket book and on the power meter.

We noted the move from 80nm process to 55nm process, but we didn't mention that the underlying graphics architecture is the same. AMD still has provided the 320 stream processors along with the 16 texture units and 16 raster operation units. The clocks speeds vary, with the Radeon HD 3850 running slower than the HD 2900 XT while the Radeon HD 3870 runs a little bit faster. The new GPU is much more green friendly and as we'll see in our performance and power consumption later on, the new Radeon HD 3800 series can get about the same performance as the Radeon HD 2900 cards using only half of the peak power.

There has been a reduction in the memory bus width, going from the 512-bit interface that the Radeon HD 2900 XT had to a new 256-bit bus. This change helps cut down on the die size and transistor count making the RV670 a better financial bet for AMD. Not only that but you'll find that the reduction hasn't affected performance at all. The memory clock is running quite a bit faster on the Radeon HD 3870, at 2.25GHz of GDDR4 memory. This is a noticeable jump over the 1.65GHz of GDDR3 that the Radeon HD 3850 cards and should give the Radeon HD 3870 an advantage in places where large texture swaps are frequent.

CrossFire is going to be seeing a significant pair of upgrades timed with the release of the Radoen HD 3800 graphics cards. One we have already mentioned and that has been floating around the rumor sites for months is for CrossFireX, this will allow three and four card CrossFire configurations in addition to the dual card modes we are used to now. The issue here will be scaling and if adding a third or fourth card into the mix will actually improve your gaming performance enough to warrant the extra cost. AMD seems more active in promoting their Quad CrossFire, aginst the NVIDIA 3-way SLI technology.

The new Radeon HD 3800 series isn't going to be breaking the performance records set by the top-end NVIDIA graphics cards quite yet, but they are definitely a great addition to a PC gaming market that could use all the lift it can get right now. Looking at the Radeon HD 3850 first, it is very easy to call it the best deal for a graphics cards under $200. When compared to cards of the similar price bracket, like the GeForce 8600 GTS and the Radeon HD 2600 XT the new Radeon HD 3850 is just leaps and bounds better for current DirectX 9.0c and DirectX 10 titles as we showed you through our onslaught of benchmarks.

The performance of the HD 3870 is good, just not great. In most cases the Radeon HD 2900 XT was actually slower than our Radeon HD 3870 results making it the fastest card in the AMD inventory but not by much. The real point AMD wanted to make here is that they are back in the game from a performance per watt perspective and that they weren't simply floundering their way through the GPU market any more, and we think they accomplished just that. The AMD Radeon HD 3800 series of graphics cards is ushering in new life for AMD GPU's that is desperately needed.