Conclsuion

ATI has pulled off quite an achievement with Radeon HD 4800. By addressing all the key flaws in R600 and expanding on its key strengths, they’ve built a GPU that’s more than capable of not only taking on GeForce 8/9 series, but in some cases these GPUs can also outrun NVIDIA’s latest GeForce GTX GPUs. This is quite an accomplishment when you consider the die size and transistor count of RV770 in comparison to GTX 200, and the really scary part for NVIDIA is that ATI’s still got their dual GPU R700 just waiting to pounce on the GTX 280.

But what about today’s cards?

We can’t help but be impressed by the Radeon HD 4850. Priced at $199, the Radeon HD 4850 completely shatters what you expect out of a $200 graphics card: just a few months ago a card with this kind of performance would have set you back at least $400. At its worst, it performs on par or slightly slower than NVIDIA’s GeForce 9800 GTX. The GeForce 9800 GTX ran up to 13% faster than Radeon 4850 in Lost Planet, although by 2560x1600 the 4850 had surpassed the 9800 GTX+ in performance. The Radeon 4850 also traded blows with the 9800 GTX in our testing with Company of Heroes DX10, with both cards posting wins at different resolutions. At its best though, there are games like BioShock where the Radeon HD 4850 outperformed NVIDIA’s $400 GeForce GTX 260!

The Radeon 4850 also outgunned the 9800 GTX+ in our Crysis tests with AA, and the 4850 also outperformed the GeForce 9800 GTX in the majority of our DX9 tests.

For those of you who are willing to splurge a little, with its faster clocks and GDDR5 memory, ATI’s Radeon HD 4870 generally performs about 15-20% faster than the Radeon HD 4850. This is more than enough to best the GeForce 9800 GTX; in fact the board often comes close to, or eclipses the GeForce GTX 260 in performance (in BioShock the 4870 was actually faster than GTX 280) for $100 less!

ATI’s really dialed in their 8xMSAA performance also. Whereas GeForce GTX and 9800 boards see a significant performance hit at 8xAA, the Radeon 4800 boards continue to scale well. 8xAA is actually playable in games like Oblivion, Company of Heroes, and Quake Wars. In fact, in our testing the Radeon 4850 was capable of giving the GeForce GTX 260 a run for its money in Oblivion, Quake Wars, and Episode 2, while the 4870 actually outgunned the GTX 280! The GTX cards managed to pull ahead in CoH though.

While we don’t have graphs, we also briefly checked out Call of Duty 4 with 8xAA and the 4850 was nearly pumping out 60 fps on average.

With its 512-bit memory interface, the GTX 280 should have flourished in these tests, but it just didn’t. We have a feeling that part of this is probably due to drivers, NVIDIA probably hasn’t fine-tuned their 8xAA performance just yet, but this is also a testament to the ROP and texturing improvements ATI has instituted into RV770 as well as the 4870’s GDDR5 memory.

The Radeon 4800s are even more impressive when combined together for CrossFire. In our testing, dual 4850s were faster than one GeForce GTX 280. We were completely shocked to see this kind of performance out of a $199 graphics card! NVIDIA argues that there are cases where two GeForce 9800 GPUs outperform the GTX 280 also, so we’ll have to test that in our next article. We’re also eager to see how well the 55-nm process NVIDIA has incorporated for the GTX+ scales. Our RV770 boards didn’t OC as well as we’d hoped, but it’s also likely that we’re being held up by cooling. Hopefully ATI’s board partners will come up with some unique Radeon 4800 cards shortly.

As exciting as these new Radeon cards are when it comes to gaming performance, the future is equally bright on the GPU computing front. At ATI’s Cinema 2.0 event, Adobe showed off the exact same Photoshop demos that we discussed in our GeForce GTX 200 article, so Radeon-accelerated Photoshop will be on the way shortly. ATI is also partnering with CyberLink to bring GPU-based video encoding to PowerDirector.

In closing, RV770 has put ATI back in the game when it comes to performance. We know they’ve also got R700 on tap to directly take on the GeForce GTX 280, but with the 4850 and 4870 cards already performing this well, does it even matter? As long as ATI can continue to keep their CrossFire drivers scaling well as newer DX10 content is released later this year, we think the $400 Radeon 4850 CrossFire combo is pretty hard to beat. If today’s CrossFire performance is any indication, R700 will just pull ATI that much further ahead of GeForce GTX 200.