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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pwnedbygary - Sunday, July 6, 2008 - link
This card is absolutely a BEAST at folding. Now that standford U. has released the GPU2 Client for XP/2003 (im running it on Vista however) it can complete a 10,000,000 piece workunit in about 2-3 hours. I'd like to see the PS3 do THAT hehe.Heres a screenshot: http://i47.photobucket.com/albums/f198/pwnedbygary...">http://i47.photobucket.com/albums/f198/pwnedbygary...
marone - Tuesday, June 24, 2008 - link
ATI to Nvidia: Im at ur base, ste@ling your customersMatrixfan - Tuesday, June 24, 2008 - link
Hello! Please excuse me if it is obvious, but what kind of fps figures are in the test? Do these figures represent minimum or average fps numpers?flexy - Monday, June 23, 2008 - link
truly, truly amazing. A high-end card which you can get or $149 at BB.NV..eat this. I applaud AMD this time after some years of disappointment since we didnt see anything exciting after 9700/9800...but this card will be a killer. Price/Performance is actually unreal.
jamstan - Monday, June 23, 2008 - link
I find it odd that a 1000watt OCZ power supply wasn't big enough when the manufacturers only recommend a 550watt PSU for 2 4850s in CF? Sounds like that 1000watt PSU has a bad rail or something.HOOfan 1 - Monday, June 23, 2008 - link
It is complete HOGWASH.As I stated elsewhere, the card can pull NO MORE THAN 75W from the PCI-E socket and NO MORE THAN 75W from its single 6pin PCI-E connector. Two of them can draw no more than 300 Watts. The OCZ EliteXstream uses a single 12V rail so there can be no excuses of over current shutting the PSU down. The PSU is also good for another 660Watts of 12V power....that could power a few peltiers and tons of fans and Harddrives.
It is sad to think that some people will read this article and actually believe they need a $200+ 1200W PSU to run dual HD4650, when a $100 Corsair VX550 would do.
solog - Monday, June 23, 2008 - link
Why would the manufacturers claim 550W if it were nowhere near enough? Derek Wilson stated that the load draw wasn't stressing the cpu, ram and hard drive. But if you factor those in they still aren't anywhere close to 1000 watts (or the 1200 watts that they claim is really needed to run it!)Maybe someone else should redo the power consumption test with different power supplies, including 550W units that are known to be functional. Anyone else see any review that claims anything like this?
BigDaddyCF - Monday, June 23, 2008 - link
Yes you could sat that"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."
However concocting that dual GT200 solution will cost you
$640 x 2 = $1280
that's what I'd call the lunatic fringe of gamers, and it has to be a small portion of the market.
jhb116 - Sunday, June 22, 2008 - link
For the official review - can we get the real sound numbers? Also - with the power - is the 4850's power saving features enabled?I'm also looking for this type of info when you get the GTX+ review(s). Is any further info on the Hybridpower features - last time I read - it seemed this feature wasn't working?
Could be game changing for either competitor if they got this type of feature to work. I'm willing to sacrifice a bit of performance to keep my system somewhat green during downtime/web surfing.
Bobattack - Sunday, June 22, 2008 - link
While this is a preview of the 4850 and I'm sure a lot of us can't wait to see how well the 4870 will compare. The test scores don't match up between THIS review (June 19) and the GTX 280 review (June 18) but your hardware stats are exactly the same.Bioshock 1920x1200
Card 08.18 08.19 (ATI 4850 preview)
GTX 260 69.0 50.4
9800GTX 64.6 42.3
ATI 3870 64.6 41.0
But I looked at the chart again and noticed the problem while typing this.
The WRONG screen res. is in the grid! (Also some numbers don't match from the BASIC chart to the detailed multi res chart)
So you have 1280x1024/ 1600x1200 / 1920x1200, which wrong.
It should be 1600x1200 / 1920x1200 / 2560 x 1600!
Its a preview, and it was kind of last minute, so its understandable.