The Fastest 3D Cards Go Head-To-Head
Table of contents
- 1. Taxing Modern CPUs With Powerful Graphics
- 2. Comparing The GPUs And Test Setup
- 3. Radeon HD 4850
- 4. CrossFire With Radeon HD 4850
- 5. Radeon HD 4870 OC
- 6. CrossFire With Radeon HD 4870 OC
- 7. GeForce GTX 260 OC
- 8. SLI With GeForce GTX 260 OC
- 9. GeForce GTX 280 Superclocked
- 10. SLI With GeForce GTX 280 Superclocked
- 11. Assassin’s Creed v1.02
- 12. Call of Duty 4 v1.6
- 13. Crysis v1.21 High Quality
- 14. Crysis v1.21 Very High Quality
- 15. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars v1.4
- 16. Half Life 2: Episode 2
- 17. Mass Effect
- 18. Microsoft Flight Simulator X SP2
- 19. World in Conflict v1.05
- 20. 3DMark06 1280x1024 v1.1.0
- 21. How Overclocking Affected The MSI Cards
- 22. Overall Performance
- 23. Price/Performance Comparison
- 24. How About Graphics Image Quality?
- 25. Power Consumption, Noise, And Temperature
- 26. Frames-Per-Watt For The GTX 200-Series And HD 4800-Series
- 27. GTX 200-Series And HD 4800-Series At 1280x1024
- 28. GTX 200-Series and HD 4800-Series At 1680x1050
- 29. GTX 200-Series And HD 4800-Series at 1920x1200
- 30. All Cards Compared At 1280x1024
- 31. All Cards Compared At 1680x1050
- 32. All Cards Compared At 1920x1200
- 33. Is The Upgrade Worthwhile?
- 34. Swapping Old Chips For New
- 35. Evaluation Of The New Generation
- 36. Conclusions – Radeon HD 4850 Is The Winner
Nvidia and ATI have really shaken up the 3D market in the past couple of months. While the GeForce GTX 260 and GTX 280 hold a number of speed records (simultaneously making the GeForce 9-series look geriatric), AMD’s Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870 provide good performance at aggressive prices. We have been seeing prices steadily sliding in the past few weeks. The GTX 280 started at $649, and it can now be purchased for just $419.
To find the best performing and least expensive combination, we put the fastest graphics cards through a series of tests consisting of 60 benchmarks, numerous side-by-side comparisons, and a price analysis.
This story seeks to answer a number of questions. First, is it worth changing from a Radeon HD 3850, HD 3870, or GeForce 8800 GTS 512 to one of these new GPUs? Second, how well do the old GeForce 8800 GTX and 8800 GTS 512 cards hold up? Third, which of the current cards is fastest? Fourth, are the drivers for CrossFire and SLI already well-optimized? Fifth, where can you expect increases in performance? And finally, how fast is the card you want at 1280x1024, 1680x1050, and 1920x1200?
If you’re not sure about the right power supply to drive your graphics setup, we have recommendations for power supply sizes. These should be considered guidelines, as PC configurations differ considerably.
The CPU in our test system reaches its limits here—the Core 2 Extreme X6800 at 2.93 GHz is barely capable of keeping up with current dual-card graphics setups. These twin-configs often show little or no improvement in overall 3D performance. Your resolution of choice often determines whether it is worth purchasing a pair of your favorite cards or if an individual board would be better.
The highlights of our comparison are the factory-overclocked models from MSI. As a result of the faster clock speeds, there is additional performance guaranteed by the manufacturer. Special drivers or tools are unnecessary, as the improved specifications are automatically set in each board’s BIOS. To ensure a fair comparison, each graphics card runs at its normal rate, with a detailed analysis of the overclocking given as an additional feature. All overclocked variations are tested at 1920x1200 pixels with anti-aliasing, and the performance differences over standard clock speeds can be compared directly using the frame rates with percent evaluation.
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Looks like the results for SLI and Crossfire were switched with the single card results. . .
Not a bad article, really comprehensive.
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.
No 4870x2 in CF so its the worlds top end Nvidia vs ATI mid to low end.
It'd be a good article if you'd used a powerful enough CPU and up to date Radeon drivers (considering we're now up to 8.8 now), I mean are those even the 'hotfix' 8.6's or just the vanilla drivers?
Version AMD Catalyst 8.6? Why not just say i'm using ATI drivers with little to no optimizations for the 4800's. This is why the CF benchmarks tanked.
at 1280, all of the highend cards were CPU limited. at that resolution, you need a 3.2-3.4 c2d to feed a 3870... this article had so much potential, and yet... so much work, so much testing, fast for nothing, because most of the results are very cpu limited (except 1920@AA).
WTF, hd4850 SHOULD be a lot faster than 9600 GT and 8800 GT even tough they have 1Gig of ram
No 4870X2 and 1920 X 1200 max resolution tested. How about finishing the good start of an article with the rest of it...
I agree, the 4870 X2 should have been in there and should have used the updated drivers. Good article but I think you fell short on finishing it.
@pulasky - Rage much? It's called driver issues you dumbass. Some games are more optimised for multicard setups than others, and even then some favour SLi to Crossfire. And if you actually READ the article rather than let your shrinken libido get the better of you, you'll find that Crossfire does indeed work in CoD4.
Remember, the more you know.
isnt forceware 177.41 out for gt200 series? so they are using a recent driver for the nvidia cards yet not for the ATI cards...plus yes would have to agree with wahdangun the 4850 is alot faster then the 9600gt and the 8800gt i have 2 friends with both cards with q6600s one at 3.2 (9600gt) and the other at 3.0 (4850) and the 4850 machine destroys the other one even with a lower clocked cpu
but yes the article was off to a great start, maybe throw some vantage in there as well?
agree with the others. u guys should use a more recent driver for ati/amd cards, use a more game-effective cpu and REALLY should have put the 4870x2 on the fight
Version AMD Catalyst 8.6? Why not just say i'm using ATI drivers with little to no optimizations for the 4800's. This is why the CF benchmarks tanked.
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.
and why use vista when noone that considers itself a gamer(even casual) touches with a ten-foot pole.
This is another reason why the results are tanked, in XP you get 15% more performance compared to these values
NVISION comes around and IRONicallY, a 36 page article is produced that is magically in favor of, whats that, NVIDIA!!!
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.
Using old drivers with no optimalisation at all fo newest card whitch was released months ago seems too strange to me. Also temperature results for 48xx are quite oposite reality, at least when compare to 8.8 catalyst.
(82 temperature in 2D 69 in 3D with no fanfix)
Pretty good, finally. Wish you would have have used an overclocked Quad so the newer GPU's could show their full potentianl, and you really should have used the latest drivers, but I give this article 2 thumbs up. Lot of good information in here.
Well the main reason why they don't have the 4870x2 and the latest drivers is simply because they made this article a couple of weeks ago. If you could just imagine how long and tedious it is to produce all these data and results. It's just sad that after finally finishing the article, a lot of new stuff has already happened(new drivers and the x2).
First I want to say that the article itself is not bad at all.
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.