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
Assassin's Creed
Even at 2560 x 1600 the high end configurations are bumping into a frame rate limiter, any of the very high end setups are capable of running Assassin's Creed very well.
Oblivion
The GeForce 9800 GTX+ does very well in Oblivion and a pair of them actually give the 4870 CF a run for its money, especially given that the GTX+ is a bit cheaper. While it's not the trend, it does illustrate that GPU performance can really vary from one application to the next. The Radeon HD 4870 is still faster, overall, just not in this case where it performs equally to a GTX+.
The Witcher
We've said it over and over again: while CrossFire doesn't scale as consistently as SLI, when it does, it has the potential to outscale SLI, and The Witcher is the perfect example of that. While the GeForce GTX 280 sees performance go up 55% from one to two cards, the Radeon HD 4870 sees a full 100% increase in performance.
It is worth noting that we are able to see these performance gains due to a late driver drop by AMD that enables CrossFire support in The Witcher. We do hope that AMD looks at enabling CrossFire in games other than those we test, but we do appreciate the quick turnaround in enabling support - at least once it was brought to their attention.
Bioshock
The Radeon HD 4000 series did very well in Bioshock in our single-GPU tests, but pair two of these things up and we're now setting performance records.
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DerekWilson - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
it looks like the witcher hits an artificial 72fps barrier ... not sure why as we are running 60hz displays, but that's our best guess. vsync is disabled, so it is likely a software issue.JarredWalton - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
Again, try faster CPUs to verify whether you are game limited or if there is a different bottleneck. The Witcher has a lot of stuff going on graphically that might limit frame rates to 70-75 FPS without a 4GHz Core 2 Duo/Quad chip.chizow - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
It looks like there seems to be a lot of this going on in the high-end, with GT200, multi-GPU and even RV770 chips hitting FPS caps. In some titles, are you guys using Vsync? I saw Assassin's Creed was frame capped, is there a way to remove the cap like there is with UE3.0 games? It just seems like a lot of the results are very flat as you move across resolutions, even at higher resolutions like 16x10 and 19x12.Another thing I noticed was that multi-GPU seems to avoid some of this frame capping but the single-GPUs all still hit a wall around the same FPS.
Anyways, 4870 looks to be a great part, wondering if there will be a 1GB variant and if it will have any impact on performance.
DerekWilson - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
the only test i know where the multi-gpu cards get past a frame limit is oblivion.we always run with vsync disabled in games.
we tend not to try forcing it off in the driver as interestingly that decrease performance in situations where it isn't needed.
we do force off where we can, but assassins creed is limiting the frame rate in absentia of vsync.
not sure about higher memory variants ... gddr5 is still pretty new, and density might not be high enough to hit that. The 4870 does have 16 memory chips on it for its 256-bit memory bus, so space might be an issue too ...
JarredWalton - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
Um, Derek... http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3320...">I think you're CPU/platform limited in Assassin's Creed. You'll certainly need something faster than 3.2GHz to get much above 63FPS in my experience. Try overclocking to 4.0GHz and see what happens.weevil - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
I didnt see the heat or noise benchmarks?gwynethgh - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
No info from Anandtech on heat or noise. The info on the 4870 is most needed as most reviews indicate the 4850 with the single slot design/cooler runs very hot. Does the two slot design pay off in better cooling, is it quiet?DerekWilson - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
a quick not really well controlled tests shows the 4850 and 4870 to be on par in terms of heat ... but i can't really go more into it right now.the thing is quiet under normal operation but it spins up to a fairly decent level at about 84 degrees. at full speed (which can be heard when the system powers up or under ungodly load and ambient heat conditions) it sounds insanely loud.
legoman666 - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
I don't see the AA comparisons. There is no info on the heat or noise either.DerekWilson - Wednesday, June 25, 2008 - link
the aa comparison page had a problem with nested quotes in some cases in combination with some google ads on firefox (though it worked in safari ie and opera) ...this has been fixed ...
for heat and noise our commentary is up, but we don't have any quantitative data here ... we just had so much else to pack into the review that we didn't quite get testing done here.