Sapphire’s new Radeon HD 3870 is based on AMD’s RV670 GPU. Even though the model number suggests it, this card is not intended to be the highest-end performance card from AMD. Instead it wants to offer excellent performance at affordable upper midrange prices.
The RV670 GPU is based on the RV610 and RV630 architecture, but features much better performance. It is built on a 55nm process with 666 million transistors with a 256 bit memory interface. All features like UVD and HDMI+Audio are included as well. As a novelty this chip brings DirectX 10.1 support and can benefit from the improved features of PCI-Express 2.0. While both features are not important today they are a clear commitment from AMD that they are looking at future technologies and will make use of them as soon as possible.
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