ATI Radeon HD 4850 Preview: AMD Delivers Performance for the Masses
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on June 19, 2008 5:00 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Crysis
With CrossFire, under Crysis, the 4850 does quite well. There's a bit of an odd scaling anomaly, but no matter how much we retested things it came out the same way. We've had discussions on the fact that the built-in test we used can end up bound by the fact that it moves so fast that it's got to move things on and off the graphics cards way more than normal. This might help explain why the relative performance of the 4850 CrossFire setup goes up at 2560x1600, as it may have plenty of power to process the scene but not the capability to handle the swapping in and out of so many complex objects (which wouldn't happen under nomral conditions in the game).
Call of Duty 4
4850 CrossFire simply ownz Call of Duty 4. Nuff said.
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
Our Quake Wars benchmark shows a much different CrossFire scaling story, as it really just doesn't do much. The impressive highs we see with CrossFire are underscored by these inconsistencies in support.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
114 Comments
View All Comments
npp - Thursday, June 19, 2008 - link
This is a fantastic card, and if it really sells for around 150€ here in Europe, this is the way to go. Very impressive offering from AMD, I'm simply amazed!The 4870 will often outperfotm the latest nVidia card, I guess... Combined with the supposed refusal of Intel to grant nVidia rights for designing chipsets featuring QPI links, this may mean hard times for the guys in green. They were a little early announcing a war on so many fronts, as it seems. Honestly speaking, I was tired from their domination and insane prices anyway, so this is a very nice turning point.
js01 - Thursday, June 19, 2008 - link
I knew there was a reason why I've stuck with amd for the last few years, because I always get my money's worth. It must be painful to be an early owner of a 9800gtx right now considering the huge price drop.BikeDude - Friday, June 20, 2008 - link
Why do you have to stay with a particular brand? Are you not free to pick and choose the best deal when you need it?Those who bought the 9800GTX a couple of months ago have been able to get a lot of good quality gaming going while some of us have been waiting for the next great thing. Personally I have been waiting for a while now, I still have a 7800GTX! Was the waiting worth it? I doubt so.
That said, I would really welcome some insight into the driver quality of nVidia drivers vs ATI. nVidia has been disappointing for the past two years. Instability, features gone missing, anomalies introduced (like resetting the colour profile in Vista after login), etc...etc... At one point I was unable to play a DVD for more than 30 minutes before my computer froze. Downgraded the driver and all was fine again. Luckily nVidia fixed that in a later release, but come on... That one was bad, and there's nowhere I can file bug reports.
brentpresley - Thursday, June 19, 2008 - link
Would be great if someone can run Folding At Home on this card and publish the performance.The new NV client is smoking right now, and lots of us are pondering buying cards to fold on.
KCjoker - Thursday, June 19, 2008 - link
it gets way too hot for a single slot card dumping the hot air inside the PC. Should be better when some aftermarket cards come out. But why does it draw that much power when the chip is much smaller than Nvidia's?epsilonparadox - Thursday, June 19, 2008 - link
From the hints in the article, I would assume this is a very large chip that nullifies any benefits the smaller process would have provided. Plus AMD chose a single slot solution which probably isn't doing a good job of cooling the chip.fungmak - Thursday, June 19, 2008 - link
Well the power that is drawn is about the same as a 9800 GTX.However, the 4850 is rumoured to have 950 million trannies compared to the 750 million of the GTX. Also, the die size is rumoured to be around 275mm2 compared to 330 mm"2, so slightly higher density, though i would imagine this is offsite by the reduciton in power due to 55nm compared to 65nm. So all in all the power draw is actually not too bad.
andreschmidt - Thursday, June 19, 2008 - link
956 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process ;)ImmortalZ - Thursday, June 19, 2008 - link
The Multi-GPU pages seem to be broken - they go straight to the search page.derek85 - Thursday, June 19, 2008 - link
No the links are fine actually... Anandtech took this article offline for a very short moment for some reason and I hit the same problem during that time.