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
AA Comparison
And now the fun part: playing around with images. Certainly everyone has their own taste when it comes to AA, but we've cropped and blown up this 800x600 screenshot from Oblivion in order to better show what's really going on. As resolution increases and pixel size decreases, the impact of higher AA modes also decreases. This is useful to keep in mind here.
A few key points to check out: compare the interior of textures between either no AA image and any of AMD's tent filters. Notice how the detail on interior textures is significantly decreased. It can be quite frustrating to enable a high anisotropic filtering level to increase the detail of textures only to find them blurred by your AA mode. Also, note how NVIDIA's 8x CSAA and 16x CSAA modes only subtly change some of the pixels. This is because CSAA actually attempts to better understand the actual geometry that a pixel covers rather than going around looking for data outside the pixel to bring in.
These screenshots are with gamma correction enabled on NVIDIA hardware in order to give the best comparison with RV770 which does not allow us to disable gamma correction. We do prefer disabling gamma correction for the average case and especially for anti-aliasing thin lines.
Click the links in the table below to change the AA images displayed
AMD RV770 |
NVIDIA GT200 |
Click here to download all the full resolution, uncompressed images used in this comparison
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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.