Conclusion

The revolution promised by Palit has not happened. And we could hardly expect it from a unique Radeon HD X2 that used RV770 rather than newer RV790 cores with better frequency potential. With the GPU frequency only 40MHz above the reference card’s (790MHz against 750MHz), the Palit version has an average advantage of only 2.5-3% over the latter. Let’s take a look at the summary diagrams.

The Revolution 700 Deluxe would be the fastest solution with ATI GPUs if it were not for the Radeon HD 4890. The release of the new generation of RV790-based cards makes it possible to assemble a CrossFireX tandem out of two Radeon HD 4890 cards and enjoy a rather quiet and economical gaming system of the premium class. The Revolution 700 Deluxe will be up to 15-20% slower than such a tandem, the average gap amounting to 6-11%.

It’s up to you to decide if this difference is worth one expansion slot and the trouble of messing with the CrossFire connection bridges but we guess the Radeon HD 4890 CrossFireX is preferable even though it requires a mainboard with two PCIe x16 slots.

It is not so clear with the GeForce GTX 295. Although the Revolution 700 Deluxe is faster by an average 3-10%, it may be slower in some games and resolutions and better in others. We can only advise you to base your shopping choice on the games you are going to play. Generally speaking, the Revolution 700 Deluxe is preferable for 1920x1200 and 2560x1600 but only if you don’t want to mess with discrete multi-GPU configurations. Otherwise, a Radeon HD 4890 CrossFireX configuration will suit you better due to its higher performance.

As we know from an earlier test session, a hypothetic Radeon HD 4890 X2 will be superior to the GeForce GTX 295 in most games and will regain the crown of the maker of the fastest single graphics card for ATI. However, such a solution is not yet on ATI’s plans, but we guess that homogeneous multi-GPU graphics cards are a dead-end in the evolution of gaming graphics hardware. Modern GPUs feature terrific resources no one could dream of just a few years ago, but game developers do not use these resources effectively. Instead, they produce such monsters as Crysis that barely run even on a GeForce GTX 295. GPU developers have to solve this problem by increasing the amount of processing cores and introducing application-specific optimizations into the driver but this approach is not beneficial for end-users. Besides compatibility issues, the power consumption and heat dissipation of multi-GPU solutions are just awful.

That’s why the trend towards multiplatform projects is in fact a good thing because game developers have to account for the architectures of modern game consoles and have to optimize their projects carefully for the capabilities of graphics processors of the Sony PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360.