AMD will one-up Nvidia's 8800 GT in a big way when they enable support for triple- and quad-GPU configurations in motherboards with more than two PCI Express slots (AMD has dubbed this CrossFIreX). The new cards will eventually support multiple displays even in CrossFire mode (with up to eight displays with CrossFireX on motherboards equipped with AMD's upcoming RD790 chipset). The 8800 GT presumably won't be capable of running beyond dual-GPU mode because it's outfitted with only one SLI edge connector; and none of Nvidia's SLI configurations support more than one monitor while SLI is active.

DIRECTX 10.1 SUPPORT

The 3850 and 3870 will be the first GPUs to support DirectX 10.1 and Shader Model 4.1, which is expected to ship with Vista Service Pack 1; but when you consider how unenthusiastic game developers have been about digging into DirectX 10, I don't think this will amount to anything more than idle bragging rights for the foreseeable future. I have the same opinion of the tessellation unit that's in these GPUs as well as the 2900 XT: It's a cool feature, but until it's exposed in DirectX 10, it won't deliver any real benefits.

The Radeon HD 3870 will have faster clock, speeds, GDDR4 memory, and a double-slot cooler.

That 55nm fabrication process enables the 3870 to consume far less power than the insatiable 2900 XT. We tested an engineering sample 3870 board a few weeks ago, and our benchmark rig drew just 117 watts at idle and 208 watts under load. That same system sucked down 175 watts at idle and an obscene 318 watts under load with the 2900 XT installed.

I recently received an Asus EAH3870 board (based, as you've probably guess, the Radeon HD 3870), which has its core clocked at 851MHz and its memory humming along at 1.143GHz. This board was slightly slower than the EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GT SSC Edition that it compared it with, although the Radeon beat the GeForce in some Vista tests.

The 3800 series has some great features, it beats the 8800 GT on price, and it wins on some Vista benchmarks. I'm so happy to finally see some real competition in this space, which is where a lot of buyers are going to be spending money in the next few months. AMD still doesn't have an answer at the very high end of the market, but I don't imagine that will last too much longer. Check the print edition of the magazine for more information about these new products.

WINDOWS XP BENCHMARKS (DIRECTX 9)

WINDOWS VISTA BENCHMARKS (DIRECTX 10)

Best scores are bolded (scores for the 3850 are shown for information only, we're not pitting that GPU against either the Radeon HD 3870 or the GeForce 8800 GT here). AMD-based cards tested with an Intel D975BX2 motherboard; Nvidia-based cards tested with an EVGA 680i SLI motherboard. Intel 2.93GHz Core 2 Extreme X6800 CPUs and 2GB of Corsair DD2 RAM used in both scenarios. Benchmarks performed at 1920x1200 resolution on Viewsonic VP2330wb monitors.