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
Call of Duty 4
Call of Duty 4 shows the Radeon HD 4870 outperforming the Geforce GTX 260, despite being priced $100 more than AMD's offering. What's interesting is that while at 1920 x 1200 the Radeon HD 4870 is nearly 11% faster than the GTX 260, the two perform the same at 2560 x 1600. It's not a memory bandwidth limitation since the 4870 has tons of it, so it looks like we're running into some sort of a processing power limitation.
The 4870 also nips at the heels of the GeForce GTX 280, but it cannot catch up to the performance offered by two GeForce 8800 GTs in SLI thanks to excellent SLI scaling here. As we've already seen, the Radeon HD 4850 is not only faster than the GeForce 9800 GTX but also the new 55nm GeForce 9800 GTX+.
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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?