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
Final Words
There's an unexpected amount of concluding we can do already based on these early results.
For starters, the Radeon HD 4850 looks to be the best buy at $199, even better than NVIDIA's price-dropped GeForce 9800 GTX. What's also unbelievable is that compared to the 4850, our beloved GeForce 8800 GT seems downright slow in a number of benchmarks - and the 8800 GT is only 8 months old. It's also very refreshing to see this sort of competitive pressure at such a reasonable price point, while it's fun to write about 1.4 billion transistor GPUs it's a dream come true to be able to write about this type of performance at under $200.
Take two 4850s, put them together and now you've got something even faster than NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 280 in most cases. It shouldn't be too surprising since 8800 GT SLI and 9800 GX2 both outperform the GTX 280 as well.
Our CrossFire investigation illustrated a very good point: AMD's multi-GPU solutions still don't behave as well as their single-GPU products, there are still cases where performance doesn't improve at all and that's where these large monolithic GPU designs hold their value. Hopefully with continued effort in the multi-GPU space AMD can get us to a point where there is no perceivable difference between single and multi-GPU solutions. Until then, NVIDIA's strategy will continue to have a great deal of merit - although the GTX 280 isn't the best example of that, at least from a gamer's perspective. On the CUDA side however...
We'll have much more information on the Radeon HD 4850 and its faster brother next week when we can completely unveil AMD's RV770, until then sit tight and be content with the knowledge that the days of the 8800 GT vs. 3870 weren't a fluke, the new mainstream wars are upon us thanks to AMD's Radeon HD 4850.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
114 Comments
View All Comments
formulav8 - Sunday, June 22, 2008 - link
I know this is a late reply but I will do it anyways. :)I am just going by what your testbed specs says...
------------------------------
Video Drivers
Catalyst
Catalyst 8.5
ForceWare 177.34 (for GT200)
ForceWare 175.16 (everything else)
------------------------------
If you used Beta drivers you probably should have updated that in the specs and whether they are based on 3.5 or 3.6. It would still be nice to see some results with the new official 3.6 driver though. :)
Jason
formulav8 - Sunday, June 22, 2008 - link
I meant to say 8.5 and 8.6 not 3.5 and 3.6 :)Jason
goinginstyle - Friday, June 20, 2008 - link
Is the beta based on 8.5 or 8.6?jpeyton - Friday, June 20, 2008 - link
Newegg had the Asus 4850 for $199 with a $30 MIR to bring the total to $169.People are reporting seeing the Visiontek 4850 on Best Buy shelves for $199, but this week's ad has all Visiontek video cards at 25% off, so that brings it down to $149.
$149 for a 9800 GTX killer? AMD is turning the GPU price/performance market on its head overnight with this release.
jovdes018 - Friday, June 20, 2008 - link
only if amd/ati could polish performance scaling with future drivers, 4870x2 in crossfire mode would really hit a hammer on every nvdian head.im so exited!!!BikeDude - Friday, June 20, 2008 - link
and how do these cards perform playing movies? Without resorting to the malware package aka "PowerDVD"?msgclb - Friday, June 20, 2008 - link
On your Crysis benchmarks why don’t you tell us if you’re using AA. You do for most of the other benchmarks. Does the lack of any AA = No AA? I was going to ask DX9/DX10, 32-bit/64-bit but you do list your operating system as Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit SP1 so I’m guessing that you’re using 64-bit DX10.I get lousy Crysis results using Vista 64-bit DX10 with my dual 8800 GT SLI system but I get better scores than yours if I use DX9.
I appreciate all the work you put in to keep us informed.
DerekWilson - Friday, June 20, 2008 - link
we do 64-bit dx10 noAA for crysis.bob4432 - Friday, June 20, 2008 - link
hopefully this will drop the price of the 3850 :)GlassHouse69 - Friday, June 20, 2008 - link
When is a tech company going to stop sucking NDA manchicken?anadtech has lots of bruises on their knees.
"stay tuned kids for the 4870 while we polish off this knob!"