We put our MSI Radeon HD 4870 up against the GeForce 9800 GTX, the Radeon HD 3870 X2, and an overclocked EVGA e-GeForce 9800 GTX that matches the specs of Nvidia's new GeForce 9800 GTX+ for the single-GPU tests. The GTX+ has the same number of processing cores as the standard GTX, but comes with a 738 MHz core clock and 1.836 GHz processor clocks compared to the GTX's 675 MHz core and 1.69 GHz for the processors. According to Nvidia, the GeForce 9800 GTX+ will be available on July 16 for around $229, which should put it somewhere between the 4870 and the 4850. We broke out the GeForce 8800 GT and the single-GPU Radeon HD 3870 to go up against our Sapphire Radeon HD 4850. Then wedoubled up the cards and tossed in a GeForce GTX 280 for the dual-card CrossFire and SLI comparisons
Radeon HD 4850 & 4870 Single-GPU Performance
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
Radeon HD 4850 & 4870 Dual-GPU Performance
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
The Radeon HD 4870 leads the pack in most of the single-GPU tests and shows decent scaling in CrossFire mode. The Radeon HD 4850 is a huge improvement over the Radeon HD 3870, but it looks like the GeForce 9800 GTX+ will be strong competition if Nvidia can keep prices below $229. The Call of Duty 4 performance is a concern, but we've found that map and demo selection can skew performance significantly in Call of Duty 4. We get rid of demos entirely in Call of Duty 4 and hand-drive our player through the Bog level while benchmarking on Fraps. We used the "Assault" demo for Crysis and a homemade demo for Team Fortress 2.
Nvidia isn't alone in advancing general processing on the GPU. ATI has also made progress with its own GPGPU initiative. As with Nvidia's CUDA, most of ATI's software support has been in specialized life science, financial, and oil and gas exploration applications, but there are consumer applications on the way. ATI has of course been accelerating Folding@Home for a couple of years now, but we'll soon see GPU-accelerated image-manipulation support from Adobe, and Cyberlink demonstrated GPU transcoding acceleration for its upcoming Power Director 7 application at a recent Radeon 4800 series media event in San Francisco. ATI has also partnered with Havok to work on supporting GPU physics acceleration in games.
It looks like we can slide the ATI Radeon HD 4870 right into the best card available slot at the $300 mark. Its closest competition might just be two GeForce 8800 GT or two Radeon HD 3870 cards paired up in their respective SLI or CrossFire modes. The Radeon HD 4850 also looks like a compelling choice at the $200 price point. It beats out the GeForce 8800 GT, but the GeForce 9800 GTX+ will be formidable competition when it comes out in July. Nevertheless the Radeon HD 4850 remains a great choice for price-conscious gamers looking for the latest in PC graphics at a reasonable price.
ATI Radeon 4870 and 4850 Hands-On Preview
AMD has just released its next-generation ATI Radeon HD 4870 and 4850 GPUs. See how they compare to current video cards.
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