The good news for AMD is that its new 3800-series GPUs are much better processors than the absurdly power-thirsty Radeon HD 2900 XT that thudded onto the market earlier this year. The bad news is that the faster of the new Radeons—the Radeon HD 3870—is just slower than Nvidia's new GeForce 8800 GT. And AMD still doesn’t have a competitor for Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 GTX or 8800 Ultra.

But if AMD can convince its board partners to stick with its suggested pricing of $219 for the Radeon HD 3870 (with 512MB of GDDR4 memory) and $179 for the Radeon HD 3850 (with 256MB of GDDR3 memory), consumers will get a tremendous value. Nvidia told the media that 512MB cards based on the 8800 GT would sell for $250, but its street price as of yesterday was closer to $290.

AMD's new Radeon HD 3850 will be equipped with a single-slot cooler.

Both of AMD's new GPUs are manufactured using a 55nm fabrication process (compared to the 80nm process used to build the ill-fated Radeon HD 2900 XT), and both are outfitted with 320 stream processors (the same number as the 2900 XT). AMD admitted in a recent press briefing that they weren't seeing the benefits they expected to gain from the 512-bit memory interface used on the 2900 XT, so they've cut the 3800-series down to a 256-bit interface (it's 512 bits wide internally). This undoubtedly reduced the complexity and final cost of the part. (The transistor count actually went down, from 700 million in the 2900 XT to 666 million transistors in the new parts.)

THE SAME, BUT DIFFERENT

In addition to frame-buffer size and memory type, the two parts differ in core and memory clock speeds: Reference-design 3870 cards will have their cores clocked at 775MHz and their memory running at 1.125GHz; they'll be equipped with dual-slot coolers. Cards based on the 3850 will have 670MHz cores and 830MHz memory and will be outfitted with single-slot fans. AMD matches Nvidia's 8800 GT in supporting PCI Express 2.0 and by including its Unified Video Decoder (UVD offloads all HD DVD and Blu-ray video-decoding chores from the host CPU, and it's a feature that's missing not only from the Radeon HD 2900 XT, but also from Nvidia's much faster GeForce 8800 GTX and Ultra. The 8800 GT does have this feature.) The 3850 and 3870 will support HDCP on both DVI links, too, so that 30-inch panels can scale copy-protected high-definition video to their native resolutions.

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