Tuesday, September 16th 2008
Radeon HD 4850 X2 Priced at $399, Claims to Outperform GTX 280
The battle for supremacy in the current generation of consumer graphics hasn't calmed down as yet. Just as reports came in of NVIDIA giving the GeForce GTX 260 a boost with its shader compute power by enabling 24 shader units, taking on the Radeon HD 4870, GeForce GTX 280 seems to be enjoying its $420~$440 price-tag. For sure it isn't the fastest graphics accelerator but its compelling price tag is what is drawing buyers away from the HD 4870 X2.
AMD had already announced in its press release for the Radeon HD 4870 X2 launch that it would release a HD 4850 X2 at a roughly $400 price range. That moment seems to be coming closer, when ATI has a graphics card for $399, that outperforms the GeForce GTX 280. Three slides from the company have surfaced. The first one lists out its vital specifications, including its maximum power draw, rated at 230W. The memory bandwidth of this card is 128 GB/s, and it ends up with 2 GB of GDDR3 memory.
The second slide shows some company performance figures, which claim that the HD 4850 X2 could be up to 40% faster than the GeForce GTX 280 in some games, with an overall lead across all tests mentioned. The third slide shows how ATI is stacked up against NVIDIA in Q3, however, the entry of the revised GTX 260 could disturb that chart.
Source:
Expreview
AMD had already announced in its press release for the Radeon HD 4870 X2 launch that it would release a HD 4850 X2 at a roughly $400 price range. That moment seems to be coming closer, when ATI has a graphics card for $399, that outperforms the GeForce GTX 280. Three slides from the company have surfaced. The first one lists out its vital specifications, including its maximum power draw, rated at 230W. The memory bandwidth of this card is 128 GB/s, and it ends up with 2 GB of GDDR3 memory.
71 Comments on Radeon HD 4850 X2 Priced at $399, Claims to Outperform GTX 280
I want to see AMD come out with an octocore soon so they can win over workstation and server segments to keep them afloat but they aren't yet. :(
Nehalem will be powerful but many say its OC abilities won't be so great according to analysts.
Powercolor card in here is overclocked one, the green bar is regular:
www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Powercolor/HD_4850_PCS/26.htmlEnough resolution, AA and AF, then yes, but is the FPS still playable :p Where I've seem 4850 win 'big' is in the 1900x resolutions with AA and AF game settings maxed. 9800GTX+ runs out of memory sooner and suffers because of it, but 20FPS for 4850 was hardly playable either.
Other than that, I like the article lol.
A.) That was only a handful of people.
B.) It was mostly only non-reference cards
C.) It was only overclocked.Even CoD4 uses more than 512MB at 1920x1200 with all the eye candy cranked up.It depends on how the game is coded. Some games do make a huge difference between 512MB and 1GB. Look at the performance difference of something like PT Boats when using a 512MB 8800GT and a 1GB 8800GT. The difference is astounding. And with more and more 1GB cards releasing, devs are going to start optimizing for more ram, and the performance increases for these 1GB cards are only going to get larger. It will be especially noticable if you tend to keep a card for a long period of time. In a year or 2, you'll find yourself running the new games at higher settings than someone who bought the 512MB model of your card. Quake 4 proved that point pretty well when everyone said 512MB of buffer was pointless.
www.guru3d.com/article/gigabyte-radeon-hd-4850-1gb-gvr485oc1gi-review/8
Just found it interesting...The power is in the devs hands here.
I use a 8800gts 512mb OC'ed in my living room for COD4 at 1920x1200.... It plays great. Are you saying that it can use it if its given to it but not required?
My HD4850 always goes up to 92-94degC max load and has never had a problem.
And to further prove the number of people having issues is relatively small, Furmark is a pure benchmark. It's mostly only tweakers and benchers that run Fur. As we know, tweakers and benchers constitute a vast minority of video card users.
Also, the only people that were complaining about heat problems where overclocked. 4850s run perfectly fine at stock speeds unless they are defective.
Lastly, are we sure it's a tweak made on purpose and not a driver bug? Do 8.9's exhibit the same behavior?
Sure, the fan speeds are too low, but it works just fine at the card's reference speeds, which is all one can actually ask for.
As for CoD4, on outdoor maps at 1920x1200 everything maxed in SP, I logged up to 700MB of vram usage in RivaTuner. Your's is probably going to system ram.