The Radeon HD 4850 & 4870: AMD Wins at $199 and $299
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on June 25, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
AA Comparison
And now the fun part: playing around with images. Certainly everyone has their own taste when it comes to AA, but we've cropped and blown up this 800x600 screenshot from Oblivion in order to better show what's really going on. As resolution increases and pixel size decreases, the impact of higher AA modes also decreases. This is useful to keep in mind here.
A few key points to check out: compare the interior of textures between either no AA image and any of AMD's tent filters. Notice how the detail on interior textures is significantly decreased. It can be quite frustrating to enable a high anisotropic filtering level to increase the detail of textures only to find them blurred by your AA mode. Also, note how NVIDIA's 8x CSAA and 16x CSAA modes only subtly change some of the pixels. This is because CSAA actually attempts to better understand the actual geometry that a pixel covers rather than going around looking for data outside the pixel to bring in.
These screenshots are with gamma correction enabled on NVIDIA hardware in order to give the best comparison with RV770 which does not allow us to disable gamma correction. We do prefer disabling gamma correction for the average case and especially for anti-aliasing thin lines.
Click the links in the table below to change the AA images displayed
AMD RV770 |
NVIDIA GT200 |
Click here to download all the full resolution, uncompressed images used in this comparison
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iamap - Friday, June 27, 2008 - link
I'm looking to buy the 4870 from newegg when they get back in stock next week but I'm not familiar with any of the manufactures, except for Diamond, and I had problems with Diamond years ago.Diamond
HIS
Powercolor
Sapphire Technology Limited
VisionTek
Any advice, especially ones to avoid?
feelingshorter - Friday, June 27, 2008 - link
Go with the one with the warranty. Which would be visiontech life time warranty. Asus does offer a 3 year warranty also.Nehemoth - Friday, June 27, 2008 - link
Check this onehttp://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/38145/135/">http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/38145/135/
Gannon - Thursday, June 26, 2008 - link
No supreme commander? :-Odesignerfx - Thursday, June 26, 2008 - link
http://bensbargains.net/deal/69638/">http://bensbargains.net/deal/69638/195 -> 20$ rebate newegg -> 20$ rebate bensbargains = $155!
To think this card will get cheaper yet!
I'm buying one asap. This is a freakin steal at 150 bucks.
QEFX - Thursday, June 26, 2008 - link
Heck, pick up 2. $310 for CF 4850s! Now there's "bang for the buck" on games that actually work properly with crossfire.Jjunior130 - Thursday, June 26, 2008 - link
can i haz quantum physix? lolMustanggt - Thursday, June 26, 2008 - link
I was watching the 8800GT SLI and it was in the top 2 most of the test, for less than the price of 2 4870s i could pick up a SLI board and another 8800 GT. perhaps also a E8400 to equal the $600 on 2 of these 4870s in CF. I am talking about the resolution i use that the 8800GT was looking very good in SLI 1680x1050BusterGoode - Thursday, June 26, 2008 - link
I'd like to see the differnce the GDDR5 made and since clocking the 4850 up may not be possible right now it would be nice to see the 4870 slowed down. If this has been asked or done sorry so much info pouring out now it is hard to keep up, thanks!DerekWilson - Sunday, June 29, 2008 - link
this is an interesting request ... we'll look at the possibility ...