Date:
Wednesday, October 08, 2008
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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AMD's ATI Radeon HD 4870 with 1GB of GDDR5

AMD’s brand new ATI Radeon HD 4870 with 1GB of GDDR5 RAM is on the chopping block today. We throw two brand new games at it; Crysis: Warhead and Stalker: Clear Sky. We will directly compare the new 1GB Radeon HD 4870 to a 512MB Radeon HD 4870 and the newer GeForce GTX 260 video cards.

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System Test Setup

We are using an Intel Core 2 Quad Extreme QX9650 CPU on an ASUS P5E3-Premium CrossFire Motherboard and 4GB of Corsair CM3X1024-1800CD Dominator DDR3.

While it might be a bit of “overkill,” we use the QX9650 overclocked quad-core processor at 3.6GHz in an attempt to keep from putting our evaluation into a position of being CPU limited. Obviously, we make every effort to not use CPU limited games for video card evaluations, but the 3.6GHz processor seems to put many peoples’ minds at ease when it comes to that subject.

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Comparison Setup

We are overclocking our CPU from 3.0GHz to 3.6GHz (11x333) so that we can reduce any CPU limitations.

We are using the latest officially available drivers from NVIDIA and ATI at the time of evaluation. For the NVIDIA GPU based video cards we are using driver version 178.13 WHQL, for the AMD video cards Cat 8.9 WHQL.

We also have Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista installed.

We evaluate what each video card configuration can supply us in terms of a playable gaming experience while supplying the best culmination of resolution and “eye candy” graphical settings. We focus on quality and immersion of the gameplay experience rather than how many frames per second the card can get in a canned benchmark or prerecorded timedemo situation that often do not represent real gameplay like you would experience at home. Then we will follow with apples-to-apples testing based on real gameplay as well.