ATi 4870/4850 Review Thread

[MarcVenice]

@scapino, Two 4850's.

@chizow, yeah, sure, I probably came of a little strong, but I think it isn't that bad to begin with. I don't think we're CPU bound that much, more like games can't utilize all that GPU power, no matter how strong the CPU is. AT should prolly rerun it on their skulltrail platform with dual quadcores ? But the mere fact that we lose framerates as the resolution goes up sais enough, doesn't it ?

 

[bryanW1995]

Originally posted by: bunnyfubbles

Originally posted by: GoodToGo
Umm how does Nvidia win the $200 market?

They don't and I've clearly stated this twice...

There are yet no reviews of this "9800GTX+-+".

Yes there are, many of the 4870/4850 reviews include 9800GTX+ results including the one here on Anandtech.

It is not 10.1 compatible. With AA turned on, the 4850 beats the 9800GTX hands down. Plus the 9800 does not pass audio over HDMI.

Yes these are some of the reasons why I consider the 4850 to maintain an edge over the 9800. However it isn't as clear cut as your generalization that turning AA on is automatically going to make the 4850 faster in all games.

If you dont know the facts, that's fine. Dont call others fanboys or proclaim yourself not to be one....:roll:

You've clearly gone awry somewhere, but you should probably take your own advice...

I also never flat out call him a fanboy, however his his lumping of the $200 4850 and $300 4870 to somehow include their success in niches they simply do not exist are certainly actions of a fanboy - how is AMD the all encompassing, hands down, undisputed winner of everything when they don't command the top performing product and they have yet to do anything to change the lower end of the mid range? Last I checked, AMD was playing second fiddle with their 3800 series to the G92/G94 based GeForce products in the same price range. Do the 4800 cards have some sort of magic that lets them somehow directly change things for their last generation ancestors?

The difference between a fanboy and an objective consumer is that the fanboys will see what they want to see and not necessarily what is actually there (much like how you're bizarrely going after me as if I'm an enemy to your precious AMD when I make it quite clear that I'm thrilled with what they're doing and have even purchased a 4850...).

I agree with most of this. One thing that I'll mention as an addition to is that 4850 is going to have the "8800gt effect"; ie, it will scoop up gpu sales that normally would have gone to lower AND higher price points. If I was in the market to spend $150 on a gpu, I'd try to figure out a way to spend $180-$190 on a 4850. If i was in the market for a $250 gpu, I would buy a 4850 b/c it has so much better price/performance. This obvoiusly doesn't work on someone with a $125 gpu budget, but how many of those people even look at mid/high cards anyway?

 

[bryanW1995]

Originally posted by: Aberforth
Use this PSU calculator if anyone wants to calculate PSU requirements for your PC. I hope 4870 CF works with my 800W PSU.

:laugh: those psu calculators are ridiculous. An 800 W psu will easily power a crossfire 4870 rig unless the psu is defective. I'm tempted to get 2 of them just to prove that my hx620 with an x3350 @ 3.6 could handle it. Unfortunately, my wallet is NOT tempted...

 

[bryanW1995]

Originally posted by: HOOfan 1

Originally posted by: ViRGE
There is one thing that troubles me about the 4870: It's only a 512MB part. 512MB is getting pretty long in the tooth when 768MB+ has been the high-end standard for over a year and a half now. I know ATI has certain margins to hit, but something that fast and that pricey should be backed by more RAM. At some point games are going to push past 512MB of data and it's going to get clobbered.

Another thing that troubles me is the power consumption. All the talk was about how cool and efficient it would be, but it uses almost as much power as the GTX 280 and 9800GX2.....I was thinking of getting 2 for Crossfire, even as much as I dislike multi-GPU setups. I already bought a Corsair HX620 for $100, and there is no way I would run dual HD4870 with that, and I am not sure I want to shelve my HX620 and buy something beefier.

buy the cards and send them to me for testing :evil:

 

[GarfieldtheCat]

Originally posted by: bryanW1995

Originally posted by: Aberforth
Use this PSU calculator if anyone wants to calculate PSU requirements for your PC. I hope 4870 CF works with my 800W PSU.

:laugh: those psu calculators are ridiculous. An 800 W psu will easily power a crossfire 4870 rig unless the psu is defective. I'm tempted to get 2 of them just to prove that my hx620 with an x3350 @ 3.6 could handle it. Unfortunately, my wallet is NOT tempted...

Agreed...I think Techreport used a 750W Corsair for all their testing.

 

[qliveur]

What I'm really curious about is what kind of crazy overclocks can be attained from a 4850 with aftermarket cooling. Will it be the next 8800GT?

 

[bryanW1995]

Originally posted by: qliveur
What I'm really curious about is what kind of crazy overclocks can be attained from a 4850 with aftermarket cooling. Will it be the next 8800GT?

it already is

 

[chizow]

Originally posted by: BFG10K
This might be a valid point were it not for the situations where CF/SLI is faster. In situations where the 9800 GX2 is significantly faster than the GTX280 (for example) you can't really claim the GTX280 is CPU bottlenecked.

Well of course in titles where the GTX 280 is already showing high performance and the CF or SLI performance is near double that of a single card, its obvious neither solution is CPU bottlenecked.

Deferred rendering doesn?t cap the framerate. In fact it has no effect on timing whatsoever.

?Frame rate smoothing? might impact the average framerate to a degree but again if CF/SLI provides significant gains you can't really say it?s a prime bottleneck.

If Average Frame rate is very close to a target/capped or Vsync frame rates than smoothing is clearly capping FPS. Deferred rendering can be similar if the engine is targeting a certain FPS level.

In those situations I would agree there are other limitations at play but only if multi-GPU isn't providing a significant performance gain in said situations.

Well that's what I saw after looking over the latest round of reviews, especially when comparing 4850CF to 4870CF. Its very clear that all the multi-GPU solutions and even some of the single card solutions are hitting a wall in some games.

How do ?timing/sync issues? eliminate CPU bottlenecks or framerate caps?

When you see a single card solution showing 55-58 avg. FPS and a multi-GPU solution with 62-64FPS than I think its pretty obvious is mostly a sync/timing issue (tied to micro-stutter also) and not a real performance difference. Someone actually broke it down in that micro-stutter thread showing frame timing dumps from FRAPs where they looked at 3 frames at a time and averaged FPS based on the lowest of the three, which basically negated the spikes/fast frames and inflated FPS.

Micro-stutter thread

Look for annihilat0r's post near the end.

From HOCP, but just google "Unreal 3 frame cap" and you'll find a huge list of examples:

Unreal Tournament 3 demo currently has a rendering cap of 62 frames per second (FPS). This means that the game will not render higher than 62 FPS even if you have VSYNC disabled. There is a way around this, but of course it is not officially supported and requires an INI file value change. For this article we are going to keep the frame cap. For the full version game we may explore performance with the framerate uncapped.

I don't even have UT3 and I knew about it, not sure why you think I would lie about this, I thought it was relatively well known. I do have Mass Effect, GoW and Bioshock though and can verify it works in those titles if its enabled. I have to double-check but I don't think its enabled in Bioshock by default. Maybe Expreview knew to disable it or its disabled after patching for UT3, idk, I've asked Derek and Anand to clarify but we'll see.

 

[Sureshot324]

I'm verrrry tempted to get a 4870 to replace my 8800gt, but I'm probably CPU limited on my Opteron 170 in either case so I'm gonna wait.

 

[thilanliyan]

From the Firingsquad review:
http://www.firingsquad.com/har...performance/page14.asp
The 8AA numbers are really good with the 4870 matching the GTX 280. This card is definitely good. Looks like I found my next upgrade.

The hardwarecanucks review has aftermarket cooler installation:
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com...cs-card-review-21.html

EDIT: On a side note, Hardwarecanucks reviews are very good. I've read several now and they've all been very informative and even include the aftermarket cooler installation which is nice.

 

[Stoneburner]

Originally posted by: Sureshot324
I'm verrrry tempted to get a 4870 to replace my 8800gt, but I'm probably CPU limited on my Opteron 170 in either case so I'm gonna wait.

I'm in the same boat but I have a opt 165. I think i may get a 4870 for a secondary rig that i've never had time to put together.

EDIT: The firing squad reviews OC results are odd. They up the core from 750 to 790 and seem to get significant increase in FPS. Just 40 mhz?

 

[geokilla]

Legit Reviews: HIS Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire Video Card Review - GDDR5 Arrives

If I understood AnandTech's article on the 4870 correctly, the first 8 or so pages was about the architecture of the RV770 and stuff right? If it is, I didn't get it

 

[Sable]

nRollo and Wreckage strangely quiet. You'd think they'd at least have popped in to point out the power consumption.

edit:

Great cards from AMD by the way. Not seen a single bad review so far, they've hit the sweet spot as far as price and performance are concerned. Fine work.

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: Sable
nRollo and Wreckage strangely quiet. You'd think they'd at least have popped in to point out the power consumption.

edit:

Great cards from AMD by the way. Not seen a single bad review so far, they've hit the sweet spot as far as price and performance are concerned. Fine work.

Great people talk about ideas
Average people talk about things
Small people talk about other people

Keep the subject to video cards, otherwise I'm going to have to consider throwing some of you guys out for not being tall enough to ride the forums.

 

[qliveur]

Wreckage was given a vacation a while back for threadcrapping.

@ViRGE: Message received.

 

[Kuzi]

Originally posted by: chizow
Well, I'd say its a bit premature to say GT200 is a flop, if you look at this latest round of reviews I think you'll see that there's quite a bit of CPU bottlenecking and frame capping going on,even at higher resolutions like 16x12 and 19x12. That's not to say 4870 isn't a great part, it is, but clearly a large part of the reason its so close to GTX 280 is because of CPU bottlenecking.

For example, quoted from the AT article:

Performance of the Radeon HD 4870 continues to be strong, but because of the frame rate cap we're not able to see if the GTX 280 could stretch its legs further and eventually outperform the 4870. In actual gameplay, the 4870 and GTX 280 appear to be equals.

Nice way to twist Anand's words. Your quote from the review was about the 60 fps "frame cap" in Assassin's Creed only. Anand did not mention a CPU bottleneck like you mentioned. Why did you remove the first sentence from the quote:

"Assassin's Creed is capped at near 60 fps, which is why we see most cards reaching but not significantly exceeding that marker."

If you notice @ 2560x1600 resolution, the GTX280 is only 2 frames faster than the 4870 in Assassin's Creed, this has nothing to do with a CPU bottleneck like you mention, or a frame cap, because it's 45fps vs. 43fps (below 60). 4870 has less memory bandwidth, half the video memory and performs this well at the highest resolution. That's pure crunching power I'd say.

Check the Techreport review, they tested the DX10.1 version of Assassin's Creed @ 2560x1600, and the HD4870 clearly beats the GTX280.

 

[Kuzi]

"double post"

 

[Kuzi]

sorry something is wrong with my browser it seems

 

[Stoneburner]

Anybody know if the card has more OC headroom than 30-40 mhz? If i remember correctly the 3870 needed a bios flash to get past a certain clock. If anybody can squeeze another 80-100 mhz out of this card on air, it would be perfect.

 

[woolfe9999]

Originally posted by: bryanW1995
I think that he called it correctly. AMD has the advantage at $199, but nvidia at least has a viable alternative that is relatively close in performance (10-20%, similar to 3870vs 8800gt reversed). At $299 - $399 AMD has all the cards and nvidia just plain sucks.

I'm in complete agreement with this.

Regardless of which card is more significant revenue wise, market share wise the 4870 is seems to be the bigger win here for AMD. With the 4850, AMD is now competitive in the mid-mid range. My guess is that the 4850 with its small die and GDDR3 will move down in price pretty swiftly to settle at around $170 street in a few weeks. Yet NV has various parts in this range that are at least in the ballpark price/performance wise. With the 4870, I think the GDDR5 means the price will probably not move much from $299 for awhile, but it really doesn't have to. This is the really meaningful part here because, unlike the 4850, this one really destroys NV's initial gt200 cards.

Even if we assume that Nvidia lowers the 260 price to $299, then it has made a decision to sacrifice profit in order to maintain market share. That is a huge win for AMD. AMD's more efficient architecture (smaller die) means it can profit at these lower price points.

Honestly, I think Nvidia needs a die shrink on GT200, and they need it yesterday. Yet I think Anand's discussion of the AMD's efficiency is right on where it points out that AMD can have a smaller die, and cheaper part, even with the same process. This generation is really an engineering win for AMD. That said, I'm sure Nvidia will have a solid response down the road. I just think it's going to require some real engineering to do it, not just a few tweaks and a die shrink (though the shrink will help a lot).

- woolfe

 

[Vesper8]

argh... i'm so tempted to get the 4870 with a HR-03 GT to replace my x1900xtx... but I had my eyes set on the 4870x2... but I don't know if I can be patient and wait two more months... Plus does anyone have any idea how much the 4870x2 will sell for around its launch? Will it be like 2x what a 4870 sells for?

What should I do!!!

 

[Stoneburner]

Originally posted by: Vesper8


What should I do!!!

1. Buy a 4870
2. Use it until 4870x2 comes out
3. Buy 4870x2
4. Send me your 4870.

<----- genius.

 

[bryanW1995]

EDIT: On a side note, Hardwarecanucks reviews are very good. I've read several now and they've all been very informative and even include the aftermarket cooler installation which is nice.

+1. They are very thorough and seem to have avoided the trap of many sites that favor either green or red.

 

[bryanW1995]

Originally posted by: Stoneburner
Anybody know if the card has more OC headroom than 30-40 mhz? If i remember correctly the 3870 needed a bios flash to get past a certain clock. If anybody can squeeze another 80-100 mhz out of this card on air, it would be perfect.

I had to flash my bios on the 3870 to get above 857 (860 in CCC) core from stock of 775. The highest I could ever get stable was 877. It would run for a few minutes at 891 but would always hard lock if I stressed it. I ended up re-flashing the bios back b/c the few extra mhz just wasn't necessary for me to play risk, civ 4, bg2, and nwn 1 I currently run it at 857/1161 and was happy with it until a few days ago :frown:

 

[bryanW1995]

Originally posted by: woolfe9999

Originally posted by: bryanW1995
I think that he called it correctly. AMD has the advantage at $199, but nvidia at least has a viable alternative that is relatively close in performance (10-20%, similar to 3870vs 8800gt reversed). At $299 - $399 AMD has all the cards and nvidia just plain sucks.

I'm in complete agreement with this.

Regardless of which card is more significant revenue wise, market share wise the 4870 is seems to be the bigger win here for AMD. With the 4850, AMD is now competitive in the mid-mid range. My guess is that the 4850 with its small die and GDDR3 will move down in price pretty swiftly to settle at around $170 street in a few weeks. Yet NV has various parts in this range that are at least in the ballpark price/performance wise. With the 4870, I think the GDDR5 means the price will probably not move much from $299 for awhile, but it really doesn't have to. This is the really meaningful part here because, unlike the 4850, this one really destroys NV's initial gt200 cards.

Even if we assume that Nvidia lowers the 260 price to $299, then it has made a decision to sacrifice profit in order to maintain market share. That is a huge win for AMD. AMD's more efficient architecture (smaller die) means it can profit at these lower price points.

Honestly, I think Nvidia needs a die shrink on GT200, and they need it yesterday. Yet I think Anand's discussion of the AMD's efficiency is right on where it points out that AMD can have a smaller die, and cheaper part, even with the same process. This generation is really an engineering win for AMD. That said, I'm sure Nvidia will have a solid response down the road. I just think it's going to require some real engineering to do it, not just a few tweaks and a die shrink (though the shrink will help a lot).

- woolfe

good post, but nvidia's real problem here is the same one that amd had last winter: if they lower the price of their slightly inferior product, the competition can ALSO lower their THEIR price. In fact, this situation is much worse for nvidia b/c amd has a huge cost advantage AND they will soon have gtx 280 beaten as well.

maybe amd should take some of their mad genius gpu-meisters and put them to work on a nehalem-killer...