The minimum values can barely be achieved even by the fast graphics chips, but working upwards, the increase in frame rates are considerably higher. The GDDR5 RAM is not a wondrous answer to performance holes caused by anti-aliasing or minimum values, but Assassin’s Creed, Half Life 2: EP2, and World in Conflict do become evened out slightly. The HD 4870 has an almost identical progress to the HD 4850, just at a higher level.
The switch from a Radeon HD 3850 to a 4850 really is worth it. The overall results show an increase of up to 47.5%, while an upgrade from the HD 3870 to HD 4870 achieves a total of 40.6% more frames. If you are happy with a little less 3D performance, then the HD 3850 at $90 is a good buy, and is currently the best in terms of price/performance.
With the Nvidia cards, you need to take a closer look. Changing from a GeForce 8800 GTS 512 to an 8800 GTX or 9800 GTX would be pretty silly, as all three models show very little difference in the overall results. An upgrade from the GeForce 8800 GTS 512 to the GTX 260 would bring a total of around 18% more power, while changing to the HD 4870 would result in a 14% to 15% performance increase. The Nvidia recommendation is the 8800 GT for $120, which holds second place in the price/performance comparison.
Special models with old chips should always be compared against the Radeon HD 4850. A GeForce 9600 GT or 8800 GT, even with 1,024 MB of memory or higher clock rates, is only slightly faster than the new AMD card. A direct price and performance comparison is always worthwhile, as more graphics memory cannot compensate for higher basic 3D performance.
The GeForce GTX 280 is still a little too expensive. At the moment, it is a very powerful 3D beast, which when unleashed, becomes extremely power-hungry. The MSI Superclocked version can achieve a little extra in the higher resolutions, but the overclocked GTX 260 comes very close to the normally-clocked GTX 280.
The clear price recommendation goes to AMD’s Radeon HD 4850. It is quiet, but at the expense of performance versus the other current-generation GPUs. Bear in mind two issues, though. First, the standard design only has a single-slot cooler that gets very warm, which means your PC case needs excellent ventilation. Second, the test values were achieved using a good Core 2 Quad, and the card needs a lot of CPU power to achieve high frame rates. We’re also expecting dual-slot 4850s soon, which might be even more attractive for addressing cooling.
One recommendation goes to the Radeon HD 4870 and the other to the GeForce GTX 260. Both cards produced results too similar for us to single out just one of them. What the HD 4870 gains with its aggressive price, the GTX 260 compensates for via its 3D performance. Both cards have a two slot fan that exhausts heated air out of the case. AMD’s disadvantage is increased power consumption in 2D mode and very high temperatures. Nvidia’s disadvantage is high noise, but for that price, we’re willing to live with it.
- Taxing Modern CPUs With Powerful Graphics
- Comparing The GPUs And Test Setup
- Radeon HD 4850
- CrossFire With Radeon HD 4850
- Radeon HD 4870 OC
- CrossFire With Radeon HD 4870 OC
- GeForce GTX 260 OC
- SLI With GeForce GTX 260 OC
- GeForce GTX 280 Superclocked
- SLI With GeForce GTX 280 Superclocked
- Assassin’s Creed v1.02
- Call of Duty 4 v1.6
- Crysis v1.21 High Quality
- Crysis v1.21 Very High Quality
- Enemy Territory: Quake Wars v1.4
- Half Life 2: Episode 2
- Mass Effect
- Microsoft Flight Simulator X SP2
- World in Conflict v1.05
- 3DMark06 1280x1024 v1.1.0
- How Overclocking Affected The MSI Cards
- Overall Performance
- Price/Performance Comparison
- How About Graphics Image Quality?
- Power Consumption, Noise, And Temperature
- Frames-Per-Watt For The GTX 200-Series And HD 4800-Series
- GTX 200-Series And HD 4800-Series At 1280x1024
- GTX 200-Series and HD 4800-Series At 1680x1050
- GTX 200-Series And HD 4800-Series at 1920x1200
- All Cards Compared At 1280x1024
- All Cards Compared At 1680x1050
- All Cards Compared At 1920x1200
- Is The Upgrade Worthwhile?
- Swapping Old Chips For New
- Evaluation Of The New Generation
- Conclusions – Radeon HD 4850 Is The Winner

My one complaint? Why use that CPU when you know that the test cards are going to max it out? Why not a quad core OC'ed to 4GHz? It'd give far more meaning to the SLI results. We don't want results that we can duplicate at home, we want results that show what these cards can do. Its a GPU card comparason, not a complain about not having a powerful enough CPU story.
Oh? And please get a native english speaker to give it the once over for spelling and grammar errors, although this one had far less then many articles posted lately.
Remember, the more you know.
but yes the article was off to a great start, maybe throw some vantage in there as well?
Precisely; several other websites tested with 8.7 and 8.8 long before this article was published. Why couldn't you? Look at the 8.6 release notes; it doesn't even mention the HD4000 series cards as supported devices.
Brilliant guys.
This is another reason why the results are tanked, in XP you get 15% more performance compared to these values
After having the Mythbusters appear, you would think this would be the most comprehensive, "scientific," factual, and update article meeting Tom's usual standards.... I didn't finish reading this.
(82 temperature in 2D 69 in 3D with no fanfix)
Also, I can understand why TH didn't have time to use 8.8 since it was released publicly on August 20, 2008 (Although ATI would have gladly released a beta version to TH for testing purposes).
However, AMD publicly released stable Catalyst 8.7(internal version 8.512) on July 21, 2008. That's more than a month ago. It has numerous improvements (for example, CF performance increase, improved stability and performance under Vista). To be honest, most of the improvements range from 4% to 15%. (In CF case, up to 1.7 X scaling)
TH has rarely been unfair and/or inaccurate and they always owned up to their mistakes before, and I trust them to re-test ATI products with at least 8.7 if not 8.8 to continue to uphold their values and integrity.
Now on to my criticism.
I can understand how you want to keep the results homogeneous with previous results but if you already know that a stock QX6800 will bottleneck the system, be proactive in fixing it. At the very least you should have done a small segment of the review showing the newer cards with a quad core overclocked to 4.0Ghz.
Also, if you have ever read any of the older Toms articles, you would know that you can still minimise the bottleneck from a slow GPU bye raising the resolution. Perhaps you should test the fastest cards at the highest resolutions?
I can also understand why you did not use the latest nVidia drivers. It takes time to create a review of this scale and the GF8/9 series drivers have been stable for some time. As the GT 200 series brings no new features to the table, they would needed little optimisation for their newer cards allowing the slightly dated drivers to perform nicely.
What I can not understand is why you would use ATI's 8.6 drivers??
The 8.7 drivers have been out for more than a month bringing quite a few fixes/optimisations with it. I understand it probably took more than 9 days to complete all of these benchmarks (today is the 29th, the 8.8 drivers were officially released on the 20th) but you should have called ATI and asked for their latest drivers. The 8.8 drivers were leaked at least a week before the official release which means, if you could nurture a relationship with the people you review, they could/probably would have provided them to you. There is still no excuse I can see for testing with the old 8.6 drivers. Seriously, it does not even have official support for the 48X0 cards...
From the title of the article,"The Fastest 3D Cards Go Head-To-Head", I would have assumed that you would have been testing the Fastest 3D cards? What happened to your 4870x2? As you have already attempted to review it, we know you have your hands on one. How can you claim to review the "Fastest 3D Cards" and still leave out the fastest card?
In summation, I liked many things from this article. The layout was nice and a little more technical than we have been seeing as of late. I enjoyed the comparison charts at the end and I think you should adopt a similar method for the CPU and GPU charts. I would have thought this was an excellent and well thought out article if it had not been for the glaring and obvious deficiencies in reason. I give you credit for stepping Toms in the right direction. With a little more unbiased comparison, critical thinking and common sense I could come to see reviews such as this in a very positive light.