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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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...
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Video Drivers
Catalyst
Catalyst 8.5
ForceWare 177.34 (for GT200)
ForceWare 175.16 (everything else)
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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!"