Radeon HD4870 - a new king in the top-middle class
Tests in high resolutions
At Crysis with high quality settings, Radeon HD4870 is increasingly lagging behind GeForce GTX 260 as resolutions go up, which is caused by its small video memory capacity according to modern standards.
On switching to the maximum possible quality settings, at the first two resolutions Radeon HD4870 turns out to be at least on par as compared to GeForce GTX 260. However, at the maximum resolution 2048x1536 the results drop substantially. And again, the insufficient video memory capacity is to blame for. Perhaps, the versions of Radeon HD4870 with 1 GB video memory capacity (if such ever appear) will demonstrate much better results. The lag of Radeon HD4870 behind its "lower-end" sister Radeon HD4850 is perhaps attributed to the specifics of GDDR5, but we'll go into that in our forthcoming materials.
Amusingly, but just in Windows Vista which is more demanding for the video memory capacity than Windows XP Radeon HD4870 feels more comfortable and does not demonstrate a speed drop at 2048x1536. On the other hand, in Radeon HD4870 and Radeon HD4850 there is an issue with the resolution 1920x1200 at which the game runs but no image is displayed. To all appearances, that is caused by a flaw in the drivers.
On switching to the maximum possible settings, the speed goes down but the overall alignment of forces does not change.
At Call of Juarez under Windows XP, even after switching to high resolutions Radeon HD4870 proves to be faster than GeForce GTX 260.
On switching to Windows Vista, GeForce GTX 260 appears to be faster in only the lowest resolutions, and in the higher resolutions the Radeon HD4870 takes a lead. This once again points to a more powerful shader unit in the video card by AMD.
At Call of Duty 4 in high resolutions, Radeon HD4870 performs on par with GeForce GTX 260. Almost the same situation was observed in the lower resolutions.
At Race Driver: GRID, Radeon HD4870 yields to GeForce GTX 260 at only the highest resolution. Most likely, the relatively small video memory capacity was to blame for that.
Tests of overclocked Radeon HD4870 in Crysis
Lastly, as we promised, here are the results for Radeon HD4870 overclocked to 790/4400 MHz tested in Crysis:
The speed gain is evident. As you can see, further increase in the clock speed could have made the new product much faster. But for now, there are no utilities able doing that so far.
Final Words
Radeon HD4870 has proved to be a real competitor to GeForce GTX 260. We have not seen things like these so far - top-end representatives of the previous two families of video cards by AMD were able competing against the produce of NVIDIA only on words, but in fact they used to be too slow. Evidently, the new shader unit with the increased number of streaming processors and the modified architecture proved to be more powerful than the shader unit in GeForce GTX 260. But the new product is not up to the mark versus GeForce GTX 280, at the same time it provides a comfortable gameplay in almost all modern games.
| Video card |
Recommended price |
Approximate price as per price.ru (Rubles) |
| Radeon HD4850 |
$199 |
5800 |
| Radeon HD4870 |
$299 |
10663 (the only offering) |
| GeForce GTX 260 |
$399 |
13000 |
| GeForce GTX 280 |
$649 |
20000 |
With the recommended price 299$, Radeon HD4870 can already be made available at 460$. At the same time, GeForce GTX 260 costs about $100 as much. With this amount you can buy a couple of Radeon HD4850 which can be merged into CrossFire combination, which should be faster in terms of performance than GeForce GTX 260. And a CrossFire combination of two Radeon HD4870 is quite easy to oppose against GeForce GTX 280. By the way, AMD has promised substantial improvements in the operation of its multi-chip configurations, but that is a topic for our forthcoming review.
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