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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
215 Comments
View All Comments
paydirt - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
You guys are reading into things WAY too much. Readers understand that just because something is a top performer (right now), doesn't mean that is the appropriate solution for them. Do you honestly think readers are retards and are going to plunk down $1300 for an SLI setup?! Let's leave the uber-rich out of this, get real.So a reader reads the reviews, goes to a shopping site and puts two of these cards in his basket, realizes "woah, hey this is $1300, no way. OK what are my other choices?"
This review doesn't tell people what to do. It's factual. You (the AMD fanbois) are the ones being biased.
Jovec - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
"This fact clearly sets the 4870 in a performance class beyond its price."Or maybe the Nvidia card is priced above its performance class?
DerekWilson - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
it could be both :-)Clauzii - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
I think You are right. nVidia had a little too long by themselves, setting prices as seen fit. Now that AMD/ATI are harvesting the fruits of the merger, overcomming the TLB-bug, financial matters (?), etc. etc. it seems the HD48xx series is right where they needed it.This is bound to be a success for them, with so much (tamable) raw power for the price asked.
Clauzii - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
Yeah! Nice to see competition get into the game again.gigahertz20 - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
Page 21 is labeled "Power Consumption, Heat and Noise" in the drop down page box, but it only lists power consumption figures. What about the heat and noise? Is it loud, quiet? What did the temperatures measure at idle and load?abzillah1 - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
I am in love0g1 - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
"NVIDIA's architecture prefers tons of simple threads (one thread per SP) while AMD's architecture wants instruction heavy threads (since it can work on five instructions from a single thread at once). "Yeah, they both have 10 threads but nV's threads have 24 SP's, AMD's 80 SP's. But the performance will probably be similar because both thread arbiters run about the same speed and nv's SP's run about double the speed, effectively making 48SP's (and in some special cases 96).
ChronoReverse - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
Perhaps it's drivers but if AMD intends for the 4870x2 to compete as the "Fastest Card", they better fix their drivers ASAP.FITCamaro - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
With a few driver revisions it will likely improve.