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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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!"