The most powerful and most advanced graphics cards in the PC world will always be prohibitively expensive for a great majority of enthusiasts, unfortunately. Of course, the best and newest hardware costs a lot of money to research and develop, so manufacturers recuperate a lot of these costs with high-priced premium models for the early adopters. There will always be the gamers out there who will pay for those pricey toys regardless of the cost. The rest of us wait until the second- or third-tier models arrive, with not quite as much performance, but a much lower price tag. But these second- and third-tier models didn’t always exist.
In the early years of 3D accelerators, graphics card manufacturers had very few card models in their lineups. Each vendor tended to sell only one 3D processor flavor, and they usually charged a very high price for it. To game on the PC, you had to be willing to spend some serious money on a 3D accelerator or you didn’t get to play demanding games at all.
Nvidia was the first company to really change the game by taking its top-end GPU, crippling it just a little, and charging a fraction of the price it demanded for its top model. Nvidia began this strategy with the launch of the GeForce 2 MX, which could offer a similar feature set as the high-end GeForce 2 and deliver reasonable performance without costing an arm and a leg. Suddenly, regular gamers had access to affordable 3D gaming on the PC. And they sold like hotcakes.
This began a great tradition of affordable and powerful cards that perform similarly to their top-tier brethren. These cards include the GeForce 4 Ti 4200, the Radeon 9500 Pro, the GeForce 6600 GT, the GeForce 7600 GT, the Radeon X1900 Pro, the GeForce 8800 GT, and the Radeon 4850.
A Little More History
Let’s have a closer look at the GeForce 8800 GT. Released in October of 2007, this card introduced GeForce 8800 GTX-class performance for half of the price, and it continues to remain a very powerful option over a year after its introduction. The GeForce 8800 GT is so successful, in fact, that instead of introducing a new value proposition based on its newest architecture, Nvidia has kept it alive by adding its HybridPower support and re-branding the card as the GeForce 9800 GT. (Ed. --It's a shame, then, that after seeing success with its GeForce GTX 260 and 280 as low-power idlers, the company seems to be stepping away from HybridPower starting with the GeForce 9300 chipset) . For more than a year now, the 8800 GT/9800 GT has ruled its price point. At $120, it’s still the cheapest card you can get for serious high-resolution gaming.
But nothing lasts forever. AMD has grown weary of the status quo and would very much like to offer some competition for the 9800 GT, so it took the highly-successful RV770 graphics processor found in its flagship Radeon 4870 card, crippled it just a little, and priced the thing at a third of what its high-end offering costs. This new card is called the Radeon 4830, but does it have what it takes to steal the thunder of the tried-and-true 9800 GT?
- High-End Power For The Masses
- A Closer Look At The Radeon 4830
- PowerColor's Radeon HD 4830
- Sapphire's Radeon HD 4830
- Test System Setup and Benchmarks
- Synthetic Benchmarks: 3DMark Vantage
- Benchmark Results: Crysis
- Benchmark Results: Far Cry 2
- Benchmark Results: Supreme Commander Forged Alliance
- Benchmark Results: World in Conflict
- Benchmark Results: Race Driver GRID
- Overclocking
- Functional Benchmarking: Noise And Heat
- Conclusion
Also 993*2 doesn't equal 1885 and the 4870 is clocked at 750 not 780.
Your sound and temp charts have FPS on their X axis.
And the price is not bad at all. The competition is so good!
In Far Cry 2 there is a .8 frame difference, and shifting to 1920x1200 costs 2.1 frames at 4xAA. This is a processor bottleneck. In other words, performance is similar with and without anti-aliasing applied because the graphics card is nowhere near taxed at that resolution or the one above it.
Oh my bad. I mixed up the numbers with some on g92 chips (just bought 28 9600gt's yesterday)
Anyhow - the 4870 is 750, not 780 - at least they were when I bought mine.
ps.
"On a side note, we will mention that GRID is one of those games that really does require AA for the best visuals. Happily, the game engine seems very easy on the video cards and even the single-card configurations were able to provide 4xAA with playable frame rates."
I want to add that this is only true for current generation cards. My dad's p4 with a 7600gs can only run it with grahpics at very low @ 800x600 - though he runs suppreme commander just fine at 1024 ...
Yup, you're right--the chart was originally incorrect, but I went back and corrected that spec, along with the memory frequency mentioned by Doltron.
Curious to hear how your dad's system runs SC no sweat at 1024. This is one of those ones that consistently drops test platforms to their knees. He actually gets playable frame rates on a P4?
His rig (2.4 northwood, 2gb pc3200, 7600gs on a cantherwood chipset) plays test drive, age of empires 3 and supreme commander at playable levels, but doesn't do grid playable. I suppose he'd have a chance at grid if we'd oc the cpu, but last time we ran 3,2 I ended up breaking their c:\windows\system32\config\system file ... and he didn't like that.
Yeah, unfortunately the 8.12s just came out and this article has been a long time in the making.
Mostly because the card didn't seem to be able to get past 690 MHz core without problems in the Catalyst Control Center, so there didn't seem to be much point in persuing overclocking much further.
But for the sake of completeness I can give Rivatuner a shot this evening and see if anything changes. I'll let you know.