Date:
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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AMD Radeon HD 4800 Series

Say hello to the Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon HD 4870. We think you will be pleasantly surprised with the real-world gaming experiences we are having with AMD’s new GPUs. We evaluate the Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 and VisionTek Radeon HD 4850.

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System Test Setup

We will be using a quad-core CPU based platform with the new EVGA 790i Ultra SLI motherboard and an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 (Overclocked to 3.66GHz), and 4GB of Corsair CM3X1024-1800CD Dominator DDR3 to make sure the system will not be bottlenecking the GPUs.

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Comparison Setup

We are overclocking our CPU from 3GHz to 3.66GHz (11x333) so that we can reduce CPU limitations.

For the GeForce 9800 GTX and GeForce 8800 GT we are using the latest WHQL drivers at the time of testing, 175.16. We know that a newer beta driver has been released; however there are no performance improvements in the release notes that pertain to the games we will be using today.

For the GeForce GTX 260 we are using drivers provided directly from NVIDIA for use with the GTX 200 series under Vista x64. These are version 177.26.

For the Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 and VisionTek Radeon HD 4850 we are using beta Catalyst drivers provided by AMD, they are based on Catalyst 8.6 code. We are using the WHQL Catalyst 8.6 for the Radeon HD 3870 X2.

We also have Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista installed.

Please be aware we test our video cards a bit differently from what is the norm. We concentrate on examining the real-world gameplay that each video card provides. The Highest Playable section shows the best Image Quality delivered at a playable frame rate. To get a better understanding of what we do, please read this page.