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
The Witcher
The Witcher continues the trend of the 4870 surpassing the 9800GTX+ by a wide margin and edging out the more expensive GTX 260. It even blows well past its own brother the 4850. Here we see the additional memory bandwidth of the 4870 makes itself very prominent with a 39% boost in performance over the 4850, well beyond just the improvement in core speed. Although both cards offer framerates we'd consider playable at our stock resolution of 1920x1200, the 4870 is definitely the much more comfortable choice, with plenty of headroom for features such as additional anti-aliasing beyond just 2x.
Finally, it's interesting to note that the 4870 and the 3870 X2 are neck-and-neck until we finally crank up the resolution to 2560x1600, at which point the 3870 X2 pulls ahead. This is not what we would have expected. The HD4000 series seems to scale just a bit worse with resolutionthan either NVIDIA's cards or the HD3000 series.
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Amiga500 - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
Apple has passed over control of Open CL to the Khronos group, which manage open sourced coding.To all intentions and purposes, it is open source. :-)
emergancyexit - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
i hope you do 3x crossfire can do. maybe a 4x 4850 vs 3x GTX 260 just to satisfy us readers for the moment would be lovely!DerekWilson - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
i'm not sure if this is supported out of the box ... ill have to check it out ...emergancyexit - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
i would really like to know what type of performance theese cards could get in an MMO. (and hopefully compare them to some cheaper cards) Games im interested in are some of the newer titles like Age of conan ( i hear it's graphics are great and is a workout for even a 8800 ultra) And Eve-online (thier new graphics engine works cards pretty hard too)MMO's Graphics usually get pretty intesive with some odd 200+ characters flying around shooting fireballs evrywhere with missles sailing through the air in a land of hundreds of monsters as far as the eye can see. it can get pretty demanding on a gameing computer, just as much (if not more) as a hit new title.
for example, on my current Rig i can get around 50FPS steady at 1440x900 but on Eve-Online i get 35 at the most at peacefull times and 20 or even 15 in a large fight with FEW graphics options selected.
MIP - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
Great review, the 4870 looks to be fantastic value. However, we're missing the 'heat and noise' part.skiboysteve - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
Not only do these cards rock, but I wouldn't be surprised if AMD has an ace up its sleeve with the 4870x2... with that crossfire interconnect directly connected to the data hub that you showed on the chart. That and the fact that they have been looking forward to this crossfire strategy of attacking the high end for quite some time so they might have some tricky driver stuff coming with it.I have been disappointed with the heat and power consumption of these cards. But:
1) Someone said powerplay is getting a driver tweak and, I can always clock them lower in 2D than 500/1000 (which is insane for 2d)
2) That hardware site someone linked earlier showed a more than 50% reduction in temperatures with an aftermarket cooler! Thats insane!!
And finally, if I can get the 1 & 2 fixed... I want to know how well these babys overclock. If I can get a 4850 running like a 4870 or better... yum. And in that case, how high will a 4870 OC? And I want to know this with a non stock cooler, because apparently the stock ones suck. With a non stock cooler if the 4850 clocks up to 4870 level, but the 4870 clocks way up too... i'm gonna have to grab a 4870.
So yeah, fix #1 and #2 and find me non-stock cooler OC #s and I'll go buy one (maybe two?) when nehalem comes out
Powered by AMD - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
Impressive review, Thanks :)A few glitches:
It says "Power Consumption, Heat and Noise", but the graphs only shows Power Consuption.
In Page 17 (The Witcher), in second paragraph, it says 390X2 instead of 3870.
Thanks again.
Cheers from Argentina.
Conscript - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
atleast that was the tile of the second to last page...but only see two power consumption graphs?Proteusza - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
I quote one Kristopher Kubricki regarding whether the RV770 is inferior to the GT200:"It is. Even AMD isn't going to tell you otherwise. You can debate this all you want, but it's still a $200 video card."
So, please tell me now why I should pay $650 for a GTX280. I'm struggling to see the logic here.
Source: http://www.dailytech.com/Update+AMD+Preps+Radeon+4...">http://www.dailytech.com/Update+AMD+Pre...50+Launc...
(near the bottom)
AbRASiON - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
I can live with a greedier card than my 8800GT but I refuse to put up with a noisy machine.Any comments on the heat and noise please? would be nice!