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
Challenging NVIDIA's Strategy: Are Two RV770s Faster than One GT200?
NVIDIA insists on building these massive GPUs while AMD is heading in the direction of multiple, smaller GPUs in order to keep development time and costs manageable. Does NVIDIA's strategy make sense? In order to find out we paired two Radeon HD 4850s in CrossFireX and ran through our benchmark suite, this time focusing on a comparison to the recently announced GeForce GTX 280 as well as the 9800 GX2. The results were surprising:
| AMD Radeon HD 4850 CF | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 | NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GX2 | 512 256MB|
| Crysis | 36.4 | 34.3 | 39.9 |
| Call of Duty 4 | 88.2 | 67.4 | 73.2 |
| Enemy Territory: Quake Wars | 53.7 | 70.2 | 62.2 |
| Assassin's Creed | 51.9 | 45 | 52.6 |
| Oblivion | 39.5 | 36.8 | 35.6 |
| The Witcher | 20.9 | 37.7 | 37.6 |
| Bioshock | 68.6 | 63.9 | 75.4 |
So does AMD's approach invalidate NVIDIA's big-monolithic-GPU strategy? Not exactly. While it is true that two RV770s can outperform a single GT200 in many cases, you could also make the argument that two GT200s could outperform anything that AMD could possibly concoct (3 and 4-way CF scaling isn't nearly as good as 2-way). AMD's strategy makes sense, for AMD, but it's fundamentally no different than what NVIDIA is doing - AMD is simply targeting a different initial market and scaling up/down from there.
The scaling, or lack thereof, in games like Enemy Territory: Quake Wars highlights an important caveat with AMD's strategy: there are still software issues with SLI and CrossFireX. What is necessary is a truly seamless multi-GPU implementation, with shared frame buffer and where both GPUs operate as an extension of each other with direct GPU-to-GPU communication over a high speed (not PCIe) bus, similar to how AMD's Opteron or Intel's Nehalem work in multi-socketed systems.
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Final Destination II - Saturday, June 21, 2008 - link
Btw, I have a 7600GT. I don't have to upgrade each week, because I have a display 1280x1024 display and don't care at all for 2500xquadrizillion resolutions.Plus, you constantly keep forgetting that the HD4850 rules in quality settings.
Anyway. There are 5 things I will never do:
- burn my money
- install SLI
- install Crossfire
- burn my money while achieving 5% more performance ("yay! that's worth it!" says the enthusiast. "what a moron" say I...)
- install one of those ridiculous dual-chip power burners - thanks, I already got me a nice heater for the winter.
If you check statistics you will see that you are quite alone on your enthusiast throne, looking down on people who "only" get 85% of your performance for 33% the money.
In fact, I would call those the "intelligent people"...
superkdogg - Monday, June 23, 2008 - link
I am similar to this guy ^^^.I have three display options: 12x10 19" LCD monitor, 37" 720p TV, and a VGA projector. Granted the projector kinda sucks, but there's nothing quite like using the garage door as your gaming screen.
For reason of not having a super display (nor really wanting one) having a usable video card gets really, really simple. I actually still have my x800 GTO2 flashed to x850xt and overclocked. Laugh if you want, but other than being old and not supporting newer shader models (a big deal for some, not to me) it still puts together playable framerates in many games.
So, now that I've explained where I come from, I can say that the 4850 has my attention. I'm never going to be the $600 graphics card guy, but being the $200 graphics card guy and being able to turn up all the detail settings for most games and being 'bottlenecked' at the monitor sounds good to me.
Final Destination II - Saturday, June 21, 2008 - link
Edit:-display
Final Destination II - Saturday, June 21, 2008 - link
"Expect another price cut after all 9800GTX's are gone and every one is a GTX+"Great. That's the way to kick your own customers in the ass. Remember the price slide on the iPhone? That's what will happen to Nvidia. Frustrated 9800GTX buyers will realize that their precious $300 they bought 2 weeks ago is worth $100 less and worse than ever.
Sorry, guy - but's that's no reason to buy another one. That's a reason to stick with it and feel sorry for each HD4850 that passes you.
Final Destination II - Saturday, June 21, 2008 - link
55nm NV280? Could it be that you are confusing the 9800GTX+ with your personal wishes?Straputsky - Saturday, June 21, 2008 - link
Oh, I already expected that nVidia will use the 55nm process asap. But when I look to the ATI chip (about 250mm^2) and then the nVidia (as you mentioned about 400mm^2) I still wonder if it's possible to use two of them on one board. The power consumption might be less, but I think it's still far to high.Have a look at the G92b. It's shrinked but due to the higher clock it uses more power than the old one. ATIs new X2 consumes a bit more power than one 280GTX and I think that's the upper end of what might be possible with air cooling. If you want to use two 280GTX you have to reduce power consumption by nearly 50%. I think that's more than you can get from the 55nm process. Maybe you can put together two 260GTX with lower clock speeds - but for which price tag? >400€? At this price level people tend to buy two 280GTX cause price doesn't matter anymore.
Maybe you're right but until I see it, I won't believe it.
magnusr - Friday, June 20, 2008 - link
Does it support 7.1 LPCM 192kHz 24bit? Good enough to disable onboard sound / audio cards?Tested it with receivers who supports LPCM?
IS ATIs HDCP and drivers just as stable as Nvidia regarding connections through receivers? Had some trouble with the old 3870 while my current 9600GT works fine.
madgonad - Friday, June 20, 2008 - link
Come on Derek and Anand!Give us gaming/HTPC lovers some info.
What kind of audio can you get out of a BluRay?
Will games fully utilize all seven channels, or just default to stereo?
Are any levels of EAX supported?
Does it have the equivalent of DD Live or DTS Connect so that games will be played in 5.1/7.1?
These are important questions that nobody has answered due to the overwhelming infatuation with Crysis scores.
Also, how well does it upscale DVDs? In theory that teraflop of processing power could do a lot.
rgsaunders - Saturday, June 21, 2008 - link
You are wasting your time asking Anandtech to do balanced reviews with something other than gaming scores. I have tried on numerous occasions over the last several years to get them to broaden their testing, but it seems all the reviewers are adolescent gamers. They still haven't figured out that gamers are a minority of users.DerekWilson - Monday, June 23, 2008 - link
we're always open to new test applications and investigative directions.specific suggestions will get the best results. especially if you can point us to a reliable, repeatable, fair test to use for a certain real world application.