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ATI Radeon 4830 Performance Preview October 26, 2008 Brandon Sandman Bell |
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Summary: Last week we posted our review of ATI's Radeon 4830. Unfortunately the board we used for testing only had 560 shaders enabled. We've now flashed our board to run with all 640 shaders and rewritten the conclusion. See how the fully-featured Radeon 4830 now fares in this article!
 ATI Radeon HD 4830 Performance Preview | Page:: ( 1 / 16 ) |
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On the opposite end of the graphics spectrum is the Radeon 4670. This card features just 320 shaders (less than half that in a Radeon 4870) and a narrower 128-bit memory interface, but with its sub-$80 price tag it delivers very good 3D graphics performance for the money as long as you’re willing to compromise a little on the graphics settings (4xAA is doable in most games as long as you’re willing to turn down some of the game’s graphics settings).
Finally, two weeks ago ATI introduced the sub-$60 Radeon 4550 for the entry level segment.
Despite the recent flurry of Radeon graphics launches, one graphics segment ATI has missed is the $100-$140 market. Here ATI’s been forced to rely on their older Radeon 3850 and 3870 cards. These cards are nearly a year old now and have historically had a tough time competing with NVIDIA’s highly popular GeForce 8800 GT, which is priced in the same $100-$130 price range (keep in mind that NVIDIA has recently renamed the 8800 GT to the 9800 GT).
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To counter the GeForce 8800 GT/9800 GT, ATI has finally concocted a GPU sourced from their RV770 architecture, the RV770LE GPU.
Packing 740 GigaFLOPs of processing power, RV770LE is essentially a watered-down version of RV770: ATI simply takes the same RV770 chip already used in the Radeon 4850, lowers the clock speeds, and disables two SIMD cores (ultimately disabling 160 stream processing cores), leaving 640 active shaders. The final product is then named the Radeon 4830.
The following chart summarizes the key features of the various Radeon 4800 SKUs:
| Radeon 4800 Series Comparison | |||
| Radeon HD 4830 | Radeon HD 4850 | Radeon HD 4870 | |
| GPU | RV770LE | RV770 | RV770 |
| Core Clock Speed | 575MHz | 625MHz | 750MHz |
| Memory | 512MB GDDR3 | 512MB GDDR3, 1GB GDDR3 | 512MB GDDR5, 1GB GDDR5 |
| Memory Clock Speed | 1.8GHz Effective | 2.0GHz Effective | 3.6GHz Effective |
| Memory Bandwidth | 57.6GB/sec | 64GB/sec | 115GB/sec |
| # of Stream Processors | 640 | 800 | 800 |
| Texture Units | 32 | 40 | 40 |
| Compute Power | 740 GFLOPs | 1.0 TFLOPs | 1.2 TFLOPs |
| Max Board Power | 110W | 110W | 160W |
| MSRP | $129 | $150-$199 | $240-$299 |
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While we listed the price of the Radeon 4830 at $129 in the table above, we’ve been told that street prices will likely be lower thanks to mail-in rebates. We weren’t given a firm figure for how significant these rebates could be or when they’ll even take place, so you may want to wait a few days to see how low final street prices ultimately are.
Same 4850 board design
The Radeon 4830 uses the exact same board design and single-slot cooling as its bigger brother, the Radeon 4850. Physically the reference board design of the 4830 is 100% identical to the Radeon 4850. This makes life easier for ATI’s board partners, who can simply recycle their 4850 designs for the cheaper 4830.
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As you probably know by now ATI has been criticized for the performance of its 4850 cooler – the card runs very hot even under idle – but the company has recently addressed the temperature issue by adding the option to manually adjust the fan’s RPMs in the Overdrive section of the driver control panel in Catalyst 8.10. If you’re unhappy with the temperature of your 4800 series card (including the 4830) and would like it to run a little cooler, simply unlock Overdrive and use the fan control slider to increase the fan’s RPMs. Your card will run a little louder as a result, but it’s better than nothing.
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Fortunately thanks to its reduced shader count and slower clocks, the Radeon 4830 runs significantly cooler than the 4850. As you’ll see in our benchmarks, the idle and load temps between the two cards are drastically different even though they rely on the same basic board design and cooling.
| System Setup | Page:: ( 2 / 16 ) |
Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650
ASUS P5E3 Premium
4GB OCZ Platinum DDR3-1333
NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT
NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX
ForceWare 180.42
ATI Radeon 4850 512MB
ATI Radeon 4830 512MB
ATI Radeon 3850 512MB
sample_vista32-64_8-542rc2_HD4830.exe
Far Cry 2 hotfix driver (used for all Far Cry 2 testing)
300GB Western Digital Caviar SE
Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit w/Service Pack 1
Benchmarks
Company of Heroes 1.71
World in Conflict
Far Cry 2
Call of Duty 4 1.4
Half-Life 2 Episode Two
Lost Planet
Crysis 1.2
Quake Wars
Devil May Cry Performance Benchmark #2
Notes
We’re testing with Far Cry 2 for the first time today. The game comes with a built-in performance benchmark which includes min and max frame rate data as well as a collection of test sequences to choose from. We used the ranch small demo for all of our testing.
| STALKER: Clear Sky Performance | Page:: ( 3 / 16 ) |
| STALKER Performance 1600x1200x32 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 9800 GTX | 21 | 35 |
| GeForce 9800 GT | 17 | 29 |
| Radeon HD 4850 512MB | 19 | 31 |
| Radeon HD 4830 512MB | 18 | 30 |
| Radeon HD 3850 512MB | 10 | 16 |
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| World in Conflict Performance | Page:: ( 4 / 16 ) |
| World In Conflict Performance 1600x1200x32 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 9800 GTX | 21 | 62 |
| GeForce 9800 GT | 17 | 53 |
| GeForce 9600 GT | 15 | 49 |
| Radeon HD 4850 512MB | 19 | 62 |
| Radeon HD 4830 512MB | 17 | 59 |
| Radeon HD 3850 512MB | 13 | 38 |
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| Company Of Heroes DX10 | Page:: ( 5 / 16 ) |
| Company of Heroes Performance 1600x1200x32 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 9800 GTX | 27.5 | 106.1 |
| GeForce 9800 GT | 23.3 | 92 |
| GeForce 9600 GT | 16.8 | 80 |
| Radeon HD 4850 512MB | 24.5 | 93.3 |
| Radeon HD 4830 512MB | 21.1 | 89.9 |
| Radeon HD 3850 512MB | 13.3 | 52.7 |
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| Quake Wars | Page:: ( 6 / 16 ) |
| Lost Planet DX10 | Page:: ( 7 / 16 ) |
| Call Of Duty 4 | Page:: ( 8 / 16 ) |
| Call of Duty 4 Performance 1600x1200x32 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 9800 GTX | 46 | 126 |
| GeForce 9800 GT | 39 | 111 |
| Radeon HD 4850 512MB | 36 | 123 |
| Radeon HD 4830 512MB | 34 | 116 |
| Radeon HD 3850 512MB | 22 | 78 |
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| Crysis DX10 | Page:: ( 9 / 16 ) |
Crysis High – Direct3D
| Crysis Performance 1600x1200x32 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 9800 GTX | 17.8 | 35.7 |
| GeForce 9800 GT | 14.8 | 29.3 |
| GeForce 9600 GT | 11.9 | 22.8 |
| Radeon HD 4850 512MB | 16.9 | 33.8 |
| Radeon HD 4830 512MB | 15.9 | 30.4 |
| Radeon HD 3850 512MB | 10.8 | 20.2 |
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| Devil May Cry 4 | Page:: ( 10 / 16 ) |
| Far Cry 2 2xAA Performance | Page:: ( 11 / 16 ) |
| Far Cry 2 Performance 1600x1200x32 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 9800 GTX | 38.8 | 62 |
| GeForce 9800 GT | 34.9 | 56 |
| GeForce 9600 GT | 27.8 | 50.7 |
| Radeon HD 4850 512MB | 36.6 | 63.9 |
| Radeon HD 4830 512MB | 30.4 | 61.9 |
| Radeon HD 3850 512MB | 23.6 | 50.8 |
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| Far Cry 4xAA Performance | Page:: ( 12 / 16 ) |
| Far Cry 2 Performance 1600x1200x32 | ||
| Card | Min FPS | Max FPS |
| GeForce 9800 GTX | 31.5 | 53.9 |
| GeForce 9800 GT | 26.9 | 54.5 |
| GeForce 9600 GT | 23 | 41.9 |
| Radeon HD 4850 512MB | 29 | 60.4 |
| Radeon HD 4830 512MB | 25 | 64.1 |
| Radeon HD 3850 512MB | 15.6 | 30.8 |
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| 8xAA Performance | Page:: ( 13 / 16 ) |
| Power, Noise and Temps | Page:: ( 14 / 16 ) |
| Overclocking | Page:: ( 15 / 16 ) |
| Conclusion | Page:: ( 16 / 16 ) |
It depends on the game tested and amount of AA applied.
In games like Devil May Cry 4, World in Conflict, and Quake Wars, the Radeon 4830 card ran faster than the GeForce 8800/9800 GT by 16%, 12%, and 5% respectively at 1600x1200. The Radeon 4830 also outran the 9800 GT in Crysis, a game which has traditionally performed better with ATI’s Radeon 4800 architecture in comparison to GeForce, with the 4830 running 7% faster than the 9800 GT at 1600x1200.
NVIDIA has gained some ground thanks to their Big Bang II ForceWare 180 driver. The new ForceWare driver delivers tangible performance improvements for GeForce cards under DX10.
The GeForce 8800/9800 GT ran 10% faster than 4830 in Lost Planet at 1600x1200, while Company of Heroes DX10 was 4% faster at the same resolution (since its launch last year Lost Planet has always performed better with GeForce cards in comparison to Radeon).
The 8800 GT also outperformed the Radeon 4830 in Call of Duty 4.
We witnessed contrasting results with our newest DX10 titles, STALKER and Far Cry 2. With the exception of 1280x1024, the 9800 GT and Radeon 4830 were dead even in STALKER. The GeForce 9800 GT ran slightly faster than the 4830 in Far Cry 2 under 2xAA at 1600x1200 with the 8800 GT running 7% faster than the 4830. Interestingly enough however the Radeon 4830 managed to pull even with the GeForce 8800 GT under the more demanding 4xAA in Far Cry 2, and actually pulled ahead of the 8800 GT by 1920x1200.
Where the Radeon 4830 really shines in comparison to the 8800/9800 GT is under 8xAA. In fact the 4830 managed to outperform NVIDIA’s more powerful GeForce 9800 GTX in multiple titles we tested with under 8xAA. ATI’s Radeon 4800 cards clearly scale significantly better than competing GeForce cards at higher AA settings.
In all honesty though, we can’t help but get the feeling that the Radeon 4830 would have been a killer product had this card been launched in August or September. The card delivers an excellent price/performance ratio, generally running around 15% slower than ATI’s Radeon 4850 while selling for just $129 (cards on Newegg are actually priced as low as $109.99 after mail-in rebate). Unfortunately for ATI however the 4830’s performance story is muted somewhat thanks to the performance improvements NVIDIA has managed to bake into their ForceWare 180.42 driver.
As a result, the GeForce 8800/9800 GT, which generally sells for $100-$130 delivers very competitive performance at a price that’s comparable to the 4830; the two cards trade wins depending on the game tested. If ATI would’ve launched this GPU a month or so ago, NVIDIA wouldn’t have fared as well as they did today because the 9800 GT would be relying on an older, slower driver.
ATI’s got driver improvements in the works for their own GPUs. Catalyst 8.10 for instance delivered nice gains for Radeon 4800 card owners and it’s likely that the company has room for improvement in new games like STALKER and Far Cry 2. The Far Cry 2 hotfix driver is only the beginning for ATI.
Even if ATI doesn’t improve their performance in Far Cry 2, the Radeon 4830 is still an excellent overall performer, besting GeForce 9800 GT in Crysis and drawing even in STALKER: Clear Sky. Its superior 8xAA performance is icing on the cake, putting it over the top if you crave the crispest visuals. NVIDIA still doesn’t have an answer to this particular problem, even with their latest Big Bang II beta driver. This is ATI’s chief advantage over NVIDIA this generation.