AMD has not promised too much when they stated that their HD 4870 X2 will be the fastest graphics card in the world. The HD 4870 X2 leads our testing with a 14% performance advantage over the NVIDIA GTX 280. However, this price will cost you. $549 is a huge amount of money which results in the worst performance per dollar ratio of all cards on the market today.
lol
Also iirc 2008 was a very strong year for £/$ exchange rate which has a massive effect on GPU pricing.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2584/9
Techpowerup used to be disgustingly anti AMD, around the 4780x2 and 6990 era they had a habit of randomly removing the benchmarks that showed AMD in a positive light. There was also a history of showing epic scaling on AMD xfire in one review then with some Nvidia card provided for a future review that same game now shows no scaling on xfire with worse drivers used giving poor performance across the board.
Techpowerup was in it's 'relative performance' section still including 1024x768 benchmarks within that... in 2008.
From the anandtech review 4870x2 shows poor scaling at low res, as did 280sli, because all the games were simply cpu limited, at 2560x1600, the top res around back then, through those games not only was 4870x2 performance epic compared to a single card it frequently completely destroyed 280 sli.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2584/2
The most relevant page on pricing. 4870x2 $549... slightly cheaper than 2x 4870s. It was also compared to 260 sli, which cost $600, a 280 which cost $450, and 280sli which cost $900. The $549 card was faster than 2x 4870 because at the time it came out 4870 was 512MB and 4870x2 was 1GB per core. It was $100 more than a single 280 which it utterly utterly destroyed a 280, lets see Crysis at max res, 280 has 22fps while a 4870x2 has 34fps. Some basic numbers on that it costs just over 20% more but provided in Crysis, THE benchmark for years, of over 50% more. Sounds like good value to me. Oh, it was also 5% faster but 40% cheaper than 280sli.
The 4870x2 was both a great value card and frequently provided better scaling and performance than two card solutions from both Nvidia and AMD at the time.
Your point doesn't stand at all, you cherry picked a card that still had awful performance for dollar at the time the pound was the strongest it has been against the dollar for the past 10 years.
I'm sure someone else can do the math but £375 at that time wouldn't be far off £500 today.
FYI the exchange rate today a £ gets you 1.43 dollars, back in 2008 it peaked at over 2 dollars.
As above, no it didn't have awful performance per dollar, it had epic performance per dollar, you cherry picked one of the worst review sites of the time that was using 1024x768 resolution to bring down the relative difference and somehow called the $549 priced 4870x2 badly priced when a single 280 was $450 and it cost less than two single 4870s at launch let alone later on as prices came down.
It was one of the best value cards ever made in graphics cards history, using a single cherry picked review that uses a ridiculously cpu limited resolution literally no one with more than a $150 card had used in years, is utterly insane.
