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
Crysis
Crysis is a game that can beat down all cards. We're once again using the high settings with the shaders at very high, and even at a fairly tame resolution of 1680x1050 only 8 cards manage to get past the magical 30fps rate, with nearly half of those are just squeaking by. Crysis is particularly punishing on the HD3000 series cards at these kinds of settings, where only the HD3870 X2 was competitive without resorting toCrossfire. This makes the placement of the HD4000 series all the more important.
What we see with the 4870 is very promising. Here it leapfrogs the $100 more expensive GTX 260 and delivers 7% more performance at the same time, delivering manageable framerates. It does struggle a bit to separate itself from its cheaper brother the 4850 however, with only a 20% boost in performance for a 50% boost in price. This isn't unexpected of course, it's almost exactly in line with the shader power difference between the two and we've known that this test is shader-bound for some time, but we're not seeing the memory bandwidth make even a slight difference here even at the more unplayable 1900x1200 resolution.
Neither HD4000 card can crack 30fps at higher resolutions however, after 1680x1050 you either need to turn the settings down or start throwing down additional cash for one of NVIDIA's more expensive cards or a Crossfire/SLI solution. In either case, this situation highlights the fact that on a dollar-for-dollar basis, the HD4000 series has negated NVIDIA's commanding lead with Crysis merely two weeks ago.
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Final Destination II - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Powercolor/HD_4...">http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Powercolor/HD_4...Look! Compare the Powercolor vs. the MSI.
Somehow MSI seems to have done a better job with 4dB less.
Final Destination II - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
Try ASUS, 7°C cooler.Justin Case - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
I thought it was only Johan, and it was sort of understandable since he's not a native English speaker, but it seems most Anandtech writers don't know the difference between "its" and "it's"."It's" means "it is" or "it has" (just as "he's" or "she's"). When you're talking about something that belongs to something else, you use "its" (or "his" / "her").
In a sentence such as "RV770 in all it's [sic] glory.", you're clearly not saying "in all it is glory" or "in all it has glory"; you sare saying "in all the glory that belongs to it". So you should use "its", not "it's".
Even if you can't understand the difference (which seems pretty straightforward, but for some reason confuses some people), modern grammar checkers will pick this up 9 times out of 10.
CyberHawk - Thursday, June 26, 2008 - link
I am not a native English speaker, but I am well aware of the difference. I am also sure that reviewers are also ... it's just that - with all this text, we can forgive them, can't we?I have a bachelor of computer science, studying for higher degree, but: I look at the technical side of the article, so I don't even notice the errors :D (although I can tell the difference I simply don't see it while reading)
CyberHawk - Thursday, June 26, 2008 - link
Oh, I forgot: maybe I'm just being too enthusiastic ;)JarredWalton - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
More likely is that with a 10000 word article and four lengthy GPU reviews in two weeks, errors slipped into the text. I know at one point I noticed Derek says "their" instead of "there" as well, and I can assure you that he knows the difference. I know I use Word's grammar checker, but I'm not sure Derek even uses Word sometimes. :)araczynski - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
of the 4850's, slickdeals has posted a sale, between rebate and coupon off...$150 each. can't beat that bang/$ by anything from nvidia.first ati cards that will ever be in my computers since i've started with the voodoo/riva tnt :)
Denithor - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
Page 15: first reference to "GTX 280" should be "GTX 260" instead.Page 19: I think you meant "type" not "time" in this paragraph.
natty1 - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
This review is flawed. It shows greater than 100% scaling for Crossfire 4870 in Call of Duty 4. Why don't they just give us the raw numbers for both single and dual cards in the same scenario? Why use a method that will artificially inflate the Crossfire results?Denithor - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
If you read the comments before yours, you'd see the answer.Experimental error and/or improved scaling for each card versus a single card. Read the earlier comment for more details.