Radeon HD4870 - a new king in the top-middle class
Tests in standard resolutions
At 3DMark tests, the new product by HIS scored much more points than its lower-end value "sister" Radeon HD4850, which allowed it to perform on par with competitors by NVIDIA. But, as we already stated in our previous articles, 3DMark tests do not reveal the whole picture. Gaming tests is quite a different thing, so we'd better get round to them. As usual, we ran the tests with 4X FSAA and 16X AF enabled.
In the very first test, Radeon HD4870 was flexing its "muscles". At Call of Duty 4, the new product was able leaving GeForce GTX260 behind. As we will see further, that will not be always like that.
Here you are. Crysis powered by Windows XP. The results for Radeon HD4870 are close, but anyway a bit lower than the results for GeForce GTX 260.
The situation almost has not changed under Windows Vista - Radeon HD4870 is slower at that as well than GeForce GTX 260.
At Need for Speed Pro Street Racing, the situation proved a bit different - in two resolutions of three, the new product proved to be faster than GeForce GTX 260. The loss at 1600x1200 can be attributed to the smaller capacity of video memory in Radeon HD4870.
At Call of Juarez, the results for Radeon HD4870 ranked between the results for GeForce GTX 260 and GeForce GTX 280. This game has always been demanding to the performance of the shader unit and "favorable" to video adapters by AMD.
On switching to Windows Vista, the situation changes in favor of GeForce GTX 260, although at 1600x1200 the Radeon HD4870 anyway proves to be faster. Since in Call of Juarez powered by Windows Vista the load upon the video memory increases, it is logical to assume that GeForce GTX 260 owes for its victory at low resolutions to its wide memory bus width 448 bit, but with the rise of resolution it lacks the capacity of the shader unit, so Radeon HD4870 proves to be faster.
We see a similar picture at Need for Speed Carbon where with the rise of resolution the Radeon HD4870 turns out to be even faster than GeForce GTX 280!
At "Prey", we see the same pattern: the resolution is rising, whereas the loss of Radeon HD4870 to the rivals by NVIDIA is shrinking. However, in the previous reviews we pointed to the fact that new video cards by AMD feel very comfortable at high resolutions. On the other hand, the small capacity of video memory in AMD video cards may play a bad trick to it, of which we'll report a bit later.
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