Today we are finally going to settle the score between the GeForce 8800 GT and the Radeon HD 3870. The battle between these two affordable high-end graphics cards began roughly 2 months ago now when AMD released the Radeon HD 3870, which can now be had at the bargain basement price of $250 US. Priced slightly higher is the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT, which currently costs around $270 US, yet offers more performance in a single card configuration.
When we first put these two graphics cards head to head and named the GeForce 8800 GT the victor, a small gang of disgruntled readers jumped up and down with their pitch forks, shouting about Crossfire. Something about Crossfire technology sailing better than SLI and I have to admit we have noticed this in the past, though not to any real significant degree. However over the past few months it has become apparent that a number of readers are keen to see where these two graphics cards stand in the multi-GPU arena.
Therefore we have decided to finally put the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT SLI graphics cards head to head with a pair of AMD Radeon HD 3870 Crossfire graphics cards, to see which platform is not only faster but also which one gives gamers the best bang for their buck. By our calculations it seems as though gamers will pay roughly $20 US more for a GeForce 8800 GT graphics card, which makes the SLI setup $40 US more expensive. So with an 8% or less difference in price, the GeForce 8800 GT cards really need to outperform the Radeon 3870’s by a 10% or greater margin, which based on what we have seen so far we expect that it will.
In reality Crossfire has to scale really well to outperform SLI. This is because we found the GeForce 8800 GT to be significantly faster in a number of games at 1920x1200 when testing single card configurations. Therefore using the very latest graphics card drivers for Windows Vista 64-bit, we are going to revisit the single card performance of the Radeon HD 3870 and GeForce 8800 GT while also looking at the multi-GPU performance.
Before continuing I would just like to make it clear that we do not believe in Crossfire or SLI technology, but we are not here to rant about or argue over the worth of this technology today. Recently we compared the GeForce 8800 GT in both single and multi-GPU configurations, against the GeForce 8800 GTX. While the single 8800 GT setup was slightly slower than the 8800 GTX, it was only slightly faster once operating in SLI mode. Therefore our personal recommendation is to stick with a single GeForce 8800 GT. Those seeking more performance should be looking at the GeForce 8800 GTS 512.
