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
Crysis
Crysis is a game that can beat down all cards. We're once again using the high settings with the shaders at very high, and even at a fairly tame resolution of 1680x1050 only 8 cards manage to get past the magical 30fps rate, with nearly half of those are just squeaking by. Crysis is particularly punishing on the HD3000 series cards at these kinds of settings, where only the HD3870 X2 was competitive without resorting toCrossfire. This makes the placement of the HD4000 series all the more important.
What we see with the 4870 is very promising. Here it leapfrogs the $100 more expensive GTX 260 and delivers 7% more performance at the same time, delivering manageable framerates. It does struggle a bit to separate itself from its cheaper brother the 4850 however, with only a 20% boost in performance for a 50% boost in price. This isn't unexpected of course, it's almost exactly in line with the shader power difference between the two and we've known that this test is shader-bound for some time, but we're not seeing the memory bandwidth make even a slight difference here even at the more unplayable 1900x1200 resolution.
Neither HD4000 card can crack 30fps at higher resolutions however, after 1680x1050 you either need to turn the settings down or start throwing down additional cash for one of NVIDIA's more expensive cards or a Crossfire/SLI solution. In either case, this situation highlights the fact that on a dollar-for-dollar basis, the HD4000 series has negated NVIDIA's commanding lead with Crysis merely two weeks ago.
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Final Destination II - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
Dear girls and guys,does anyone know of a manufacturer, who offers a HD4850 with a better cooler? I'm desperately searching for one...
Please reply!
Graven Image - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
Asus recently announced a 4850 with a non-stock cooler, though their version still doesn't expel the air out the back like a dual slot design. (http://www.asus.com/news_show.aspx?id=11871)">http://www.asus.com/news_show.aspx?id=11871). Its not available yet thought. My guess is mid-July we'll probably start seeing a couple different fan and heatsink designs.strikeback03 - Thursday, June 26, 2008 - link
Only dual-slot card I've ever used was an EVGA 8800GTS 640, it sucked air in the back and blew it into the case.Final Destination II - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
Nice! 7°C cooler, that's a start! I guess I'll wait a bit more, then.Spacecomber - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
Although I'm somewhat dubious about dual card solutions, I keep looking at the benchmarks and then at the prices for a couple of 8800 GTs.Perhaps, if the 4870 forces Nvidia to reduce their prices for the GTX 260 and the GTX 280, they will likewise bring down the price for the 9800 GX2. This is already the fastest single card solution, and it sells for less than the GTX 280. If this card starts selling for under $400 (maybe around $350), will this become Nvidia's best answer to the 4870?
Given the performance and the prices for the 4870 and the 9800 GX2 will Nvidia be able to price the GTX 280 competitively, or will it simply be vanity product - ridiculously priced and produced only in very small numbers?
It should be interesting to see where the prices for video cards end up over the course of the next few weeks.
kelmerp - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
Better HD knickknacks? Better offloading/upscaling?chizow - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
The HD4000 series have better HDMI sound support with 8ch LPCM over HDMI, but still can't pass uncompressed bistreams. Image quality hasn't changed as there isn't really any room to improve.kelmerp - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
It would be nice to have a video card, where it doesn't matter how weak the current-gen processor is (say the lowliest celeron available), the card can still output 1080p HDTV without dropping any frames.Chaser - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
Good to have back at the FRONT of the finish line.JPForums - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
Ragarding the SLI scaling in Witcher:The GTX 280 SLI setup may be running into a bottleneck or driver issues, rather than seeing inherent scaling issues. Consider, the 9800 GTX+ SLI setup scales from 22.9 to 44.5. So the scaling isn't an inherent SLI scaling problem. Though it may point to scaling issues specific to the GTX 280, it is more likely that the problem lies elsewhere. I do, however, agree with your general statement that when CF is working properly, it tends to scale better. In my systems, it seems to require less CPU overhead.