ATI HD 3850 256MB Videocard

Turbulent.  Tumultuous.  Bumpy.  Disappointing.  There's no shortage of unflattering adjectives to describe AMD's journey through 2007, including their graphics division, ATI.  Purchased just over a year ago for roughly $5.4 billion, the acquisition's long-term verdict remains to be written.  In the meantime, the short-term outlook hasn't been rosy up to this point, with ATI conceding defeat in the high end GPU arena and instead focusing primarily on the budget and lower mid-range sectors, much to the chagrin of the ATI-loyal.  That's about to change.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, ATI still doesn't have an answer for nVidia's flagship 8800GTX and Ultra GPUs, but with the release of the RV670 core, they're no longer relegating themselves to the lower end graphics market, and seem to be targeting the upper mainstream market with a vengeance.

Picking up where the 2900XT left off, ATI's HD 3850 and HD 3870 sport several improvements, starting with a die shrink.  The 55nm GPU consumes less power than the 80nm 2900XT, while adding support for DirectX 10.1 and PCI Express 2.0.  More meaningful is the inclusion of ATI's Universal Video Decoder (UVD), which offloads high definition video playback from the CPU to the GPU.  Toss a friendly price tag into the fray, and the new HD 38xx series appears to be what the 2x00 series should have been all along, but how does the performance hold up?

Specifications

Model	HD 3850
Core	RV670
Memory	256MB GDDR3
Memory Speed	1660MHz
Core Clockspeed	670MHz
Vista/DX10 Ready?	Yes
HDCP Ready?	Yes