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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NullSubroutine - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
It scaled more than 100% in a few games?DerekWilson - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
greater than 100% scaling is due to margin of error combination for both single card and dual card tests in the vast majority of cases.we also tested single card performance on an nvidia system and crossfire performance on an intel system, so the different computers will also add margin of error.
two card solutions generally don't scale at greater than 100% except in extraordinarily odd situations (where rebalancing loads might help with scaling on both individual cards -- but that's odd and rare).
Sind - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
Why no 260 and 280 SLI?ImmortalZ - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
Because, with that kind of money, one can an entire system with one 48xx :PAlso, page 10 appears to be broken.
Lifted - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
No 260 or 280 SLI in the benchmarks, but they included them in the power charts. Odd.Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
The power data was simply taken from the GTX 280 review, we just added to the list.As for the GTX 280 SLI numbers, we didn't include them as it it's mostly out of the price range of the Radeon HD 4870 ($1300 vs. $600 for two 4870s). We can always go back and redo the graphs to include them if you guys would like, but in the interim I would suggest looking at the GTX review to get comparison numbers.
Take care,
Anand
DerekWilson - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
we actually only have one GTX 260, so we can't test thatClauzii - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
Yes, and the click to enlarge doesn't work.And believe it or not, posting right now from a AT page that looks like 1994...!
ImmortalZ - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
Insert a buy in there. Need edit!TonyB - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
but can it play crysis?