ATI Radeon HD 4850 Preview: AMD Delivers Performance for the Masses
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on June 19, 2008 5:00 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Assassin's Creed
Two GeForce 8800 GTs in SLI outperform a single GeForce GTX 280, and two Radeon HD 4850s in CrossFire outperform the 8800 GT SLI, so AMD manages to outperform NVIDIA's brand new GT200 with a pair of cheaper, slower cards. The two actually end up performing like a GeForce 9800 GX2 here as well.
It's not so much that the Radeon HD 4850 is ultra competitive, but rather that the GTX 280 isn't terribly competitive with NVIDIA's own $400-$500 multi-GPU solutions.
Assassin's Creed has a ~60 fps frame rate cap, so the flat performance of the 4850 in CrossFire simply indicates that it kept bumping off of the frame rate limiter resulting in static performance throughout all three resolutions.
Oblivion
While CrossFire tends to not scale as consistently as SLI, when it does, it scales very well. The performance of two 4850s is nearly double that of a single card and it puts AMD at the absolute top of the performance charts here.
The Witcher
The Witcher is a good example of an area where CrossFire fails to scale - despite the Radeon HD 3870 X2 scaling, we could not get the 4850 to show any performance benefit with two GPUs. It could be an issue with the 4850 drivers or a special trait of the 3870's driver, at this point it's tough to tell.
Bioshock
While we see scaling at 1920 x 1200, at 2560 x 1600 there's no benefit to two 4850s over one. We could be bumping into a memory bandwidth limitation or some continued strangeness in AMD's CrossFire drivers.
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npp - Thursday, June 19, 2008 - link
This is a fantastic card, and if it really sells for around 150€ here in Europe, this is the way to go. Very impressive offering from AMD, I'm simply amazed!The 4870 will often outperfotm the latest nVidia card, I guess... Combined with the supposed refusal of Intel to grant nVidia rights for designing chipsets featuring QPI links, this may mean hard times for the guys in green. They were a little early announcing a war on so many fronts, as it seems. Honestly speaking, I was tired from their domination and insane prices anyway, so this is a very nice turning point.
js01 - Thursday, June 19, 2008 - link
I knew there was a reason why I've stuck with amd for the last few years, because I always get my money's worth. It must be painful to be an early owner of a 9800gtx right now considering the huge price drop.BikeDude - Friday, June 20, 2008 - link
Why do you have to stay with a particular brand? Are you not free to pick and choose the best deal when you need it?Those who bought the 9800GTX a couple of months ago have been able to get a lot of good quality gaming going while some of us have been waiting for the next great thing. Personally I have been waiting for a while now, I still have a 7800GTX! Was the waiting worth it? I doubt so.
That said, I would really welcome some insight into the driver quality of nVidia drivers vs ATI. nVidia has been disappointing for the past two years. Instability, features gone missing, anomalies introduced (like resetting the colour profile in Vista after login), etc...etc... At one point I was unable to play a DVD for more than 30 minutes before my computer froze. Downgraded the driver and all was fine again. Luckily nVidia fixed that in a later release, but come on... That one was bad, and there's nowhere I can file bug reports.
brentpresley - Thursday, June 19, 2008 - link
Would be great if someone can run Folding At Home on this card and publish the performance.The new NV client is smoking right now, and lots of us are pondering buying cards to fold on.
KCjoker - Thursday, June 19, 2008 - link
it gets way too hot for a single slot card dumping the hot air inside the PC. Should be better when some aftermarket cards come out. But why does it draw that much power when the chip is much smaller than Nvidia's?epsilonparadox - Thursday, June 19, 2008 - link
From the hints in the article, I would assume this is a very large chip that nullifies any benefits the smaller process would have provided. Plus AMD chose a single slot solution which probably isn't doing a good job of cooling the chip.fungmak - Thursday, June 19, 2008 - link
Well the power that is drawn is about the same as a 9800 GTX.However, the 4850 is rumoured to have 950 million trannies compared to the 750 million of the GTX. Also, the die size is rumoured to be around 275mm2 compared to 330 mm"2, so slightly higher density, though i would imagine this is offsite by the reduciton in power due to 55nm compared to 65nm. So all in all the power draw is actually not too bad.
andreschmidt - Thursday, June 19, 2008 - link
956 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process ;)ImmortalZ - Thursday, June 19, 2008 - link
The Multi-GPU pages seem to be broken - they go straight to the search page.derek85 - Thursday, June 19, 2008 - link
No the links are fine actually... Anandtech took this article offline for a very short moment for some reason and I hit the same problem during that time.