ATI Radeon HD 4850: Smarter by Design? : Introduction
Source: Tom's Hardware – Keywords: radeon, hd, 4850
Introduction
It has been a long time since Nvidia and ATI released new architectures so close to one another. The last time this happened was in 2004, with the R420 and NV40 launches, and overall the two architectures were extremely similar (six vertex shaders, 16 pixel pipelines, 16 texture units, etc.) Since that time the two companies have followed divergent paths with their architectures, but while they may not have necessarily agreed on technical choices, they both stayed with the concept of monolithic GPUs – with each new generation, the number of transistors have more or less doubled, and then, based on these enormous chips, a full line of cards was produced by varying the number of processing units.
No doubt encouraged by the success of its G80, Nvidia has chosen to continue using that approach as you know if you’ve read our article on the GT200. ATI, on the other hand, since it was bought out by AMD, has had a number of difficulties, in particular with its R600 architecture, which didn’t perform as expected and caused many technical difficulties for the engineers. With its financial problems, it was hard for AMD to continue battling it out with Nvidia, whose sterling financial health enabled them to continue developing such chips. So instead of continuing to focus on raw performance, AMD decided to concentrate on two factors – performance per watt and performance per mm² of die. Have they succeeded?
- Next page The Radeon HD 4000 Series
- iBuypower Gamer 942IL: Best of the Best?
- Nvidia's CUDA: The End of the CPU?
- Nvidia GeForce GTX 260/280 Review
- Quad SLI Vs. 3-Way SLI
- Comparative Component Charts
- Best Graphics Cards for the Money: June 08
- Radeon 3850 AGP Plus Single-Core CPU
- GPU vs. CPU Upgrade: Extensive Tests
- NForce 780a SLI Debuts Hybrid SLI
- How To Overclock Your Graphics Card
Prices on the UK market put a HD4850 at £120 (ebuyer.com) where as the GTX260 is £300! considering the overal performance difference between the two, i'd get 2 HD4850's in Crossfire mode and still be cheaper than a GTX260.
Once again AMD/ATI have produced a card that isnt amazing on performance, but bang for your buck its probably the best card on the market at those prices
Apparently they use 160W at load but beat the 3870 on performance/W by a long way.
Can't wait to see it. Even though I know that this site rakes in more from intel/nvidia.
Dual 4870s can take on a 280 no sweat and push for serious performance, and they're supposedly near similar price. By itself the 4870 takes on the $100USD more; 260. I smell price drops.