Date:
Sunday , March 08, 2009
Author:
Mark Warner
Editor:
Brent Justice
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Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 1GB

Today, we have Sapphire's Radeon HD 4850 X2 on the test bench. With 512MB of memory available to each GPU, will this video card's performance suffer, or can the considerable amount of shader power make up for it? We'll find the answer to that question and more with the help of six of today's hottest games!

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Call of Duty: World at War

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Call of Duty: World at War is the 5th game in the Call of Duty franchise and the successor to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. World at War is based on the same game core graphics engine as CoD4, but the engine has been tweaked and updated for the new game. We have chosen to do perform our manual run-through in the mission: "Their Land, Their Blood." This level provides a bright outdoor scene with plenty of particles, explosions, fire propagation, and a lot of vegetation.

Highest Playable Settings

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Right off the starting line, the Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 is an impressive performer in Call of Duty: world at War, allowing us to use 4X MSAA at 2560x1600, of course with 16X AF and the highest in-game options. We tried enabling 12X CFAA (via the edge-detect custom AA filter), but that had a devastating impact on performance due to a bug in the game engine. The same bug affects Call of Duty 4. In CoD4, you can turn the Water Quality option down to alleviate the problem, but CoD5 has no such option. At any rate, 4X MSAA at 2560x1600 is still quite acceptable and looks just fine.

Both the AMD Radeon HD 4870 1GB and the GeForce GTX 260 allowed us to use 2X MSAA at 2560x1600, also with 16X AF and the maximum in-game graphics settings. Between those two video cards, the GeForce GTX 260 was slightly faster, but the Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 blew the doors off of both of them.