Digit-Life posted a preview of the ATI RADEON HD 4870 X2 (R700) 2x1024MB video card. Instead of doubling the memory capacity of HD 4870 512MB, this novelty has four times as much: 2x1024MB (2GB) RAM.

Though it is obvious that theoretically HD 4870 X2 can be twice as powerful as HD 4870, in real life it outperforms the latter by a factor of x1.5 - x1.8, sometimes less. Looking at charts and those nice performance values, remember that all dual-GPU cards, be it AMD or NVIDIA, have a serious drawback: GPU load balancing by software. Their performance in games fully depends on drivers. There are many games, in which these superpowerful monsters perform bad, because of one GPU being overloaded and the other being almost free. This causes performance jumps from 5 to 60 fps and can be rather annoying.

But for now we can state that AMD has managed to create the fastest graphics card in the world (in terms of average fps). Just remember that a couple of benchmarks is not everything there is. Graphics cards are optimized in the first place for most popular games and especially 3DMark. If you remember, there were similar issues with HD 3870 X2. Still, preliminary tests indicate that RADEON HD 4870 X2 has significantly fewer issues related to performance jumps. The reason can be the new PEX bridge as well as improved drivers. Anyway, we'll be delving deeper into this and everything will become clear by the time of announcement. It's a pity that AMD stopped producing high-end single-GPU solutions comparable to similar products from NVIDIA. Now it only makes mid-end single-GPU cards, pairing them for the high-end segment. Drawing a preliminary bottom line, we can state that R700 is actually very fast and, despite potential drawbacks, it seriously threatens top solutions from NVIDIA. So, let's wait for its response. And remember that i's are not dotted yet, stay tuned for further tests.