Turbulent, tumultuous, bumpy, disappointing... There's no shortage of unflattering adjectives to describe AMD's journey through 2007, and including their graphics division, ATI. Being purchased just over a year ago for roughly $5.4 billion, the acquisition's long term verdict remains to be written. In the meantime, the short term outlook hasn't been rosy up to this point, with ATI conceding defeat in the high-end GPU arena and instead focusing primarily on the budget and lower mid-range sectors, much to the chagrin of the ATI loyal. That's about to change. Before we get ahead of ourselves, ATI still doesn't have an answer for NVIDIA's flagship GeForce 8800 GTX and Ultra graphics card. - HardwareLogic

ATI Radeon HD 3850 256MB Graphics Version Review

Picking up where the Radeon 2900 XT left off, ATI's Radeon HD 3850 and Radeon HD 3870 sport several improvements, starting with a die shrink. The 55nm GPU consumes less power than the 80nm Radeon 2900 XT, while adding support for DirectX 10.1 and PCI Express 2.0. More meaningful is the inclusion of ATI's Universal Video Decoder, which offloads high definition video playback from the CPU to the GPU. Toss a friendly price tag into the fray, and the new Radeon HD 3800 series appears to be what the Radeon HD 2900 series should have been all along, but how does the performance hold up?

Because we're dealing with an ATI branded production sample, we weren't expecting a glamorous bundle, nor were our expectations exceeded. All cards should come with the bare essentials. Taking a quick tour of Newegg's stock, we were somewhat surprised to see most third party manufacturers offering little more than what we received with our sample. Red remains all the rage for ATI, with both the PCB and the transparent heatsink taking on a crimson hue. Underneath the hood, the new RV670 core chugs along at 670MHz, while the Samsung memory chips cruise at a modest 1660MHz.

But the most interesting thing to note about the Radeon HD 3800 series are the dual notches at the top of the card and included CrossFire bridge. The dual notches aren't new, but when combined with AMD's 790FX chipset, you'll be able to run up to four of these cards for a quad-GPU gaming experience as part of ATI's CrossFireX technology. Best of all, ATI is the first company out of the gates to support multiple monitors on a multiple GPU setup, a feature that's been long overdue. The Radeon HD 3850 requires a 6-pin PCI Express power source from your power supply, and comes with a peak rating of just 95W.

It's been a long time since anything out of ATI's camp has excited us, but that's exactly what the RV670 architecture has done. More than just a die shrink, the Radeon HD 3800 series brings with it DirectX 10.1 support, PCI Express 2.0 and most importantly the inclusion of ATI's Universal Video Decoder. And if that weren't enough, we finally get multiple monitor support on multiple card setups. Yes, we said multiple and not dual card, because the RV670 release coincides with ATI's CrossFireX technology, which brings tri-GPU and quad-GPU setups to the table, which should go ahead the 3-Way SLI technology from NVIDIA.

On the performance front, the Radeon HD 3850 proved to be an impressive contender, able to hold playable frame rates in most games at high resolutions and cranked up visual quality settings. Crysis in all its visual glory was too much to handle, giving us a reality check that ATI still doesn't have an answer to NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GTX and Ultra video cards. But in the mainstream sector, the Radeon HD 3850 becomes a viable option. And should you decide to overclock, you'll be treated to real world performance gains.