in the lab^
hands on with the latest hardware and softwarel
ast month, we spent a ton of time talk-
ing about the efficiency and overall
pixel-pushing prowess of ATI’s new
GPU, so we won’t waste much ink on the
subject here. Suffice it to say, the 4850 deliv-
ers enough power to drive your sweet, new
22-inch monitor at its native resolution.
The card’s silicon is equivalent to
that of previous-gen high-end cards. It’s
equipped with 512MB of GDDR3 memory
running at 993MHz. Unlike the Radeon HD
4870 boards (which cost $100 more), the
4850 doesn’t sport GDDR5 (GDDR5 trans-
fers twice as much data per clock cycle as
GDDR3). The upshot? The HD 4850 has the
slowest memory interface of any card inthe current generation, and benchmarks
show that—especially at high AA/aniso-
tropic filtering levels.
The HD 4850 does sport the same GPU
as the 4870, but it’s clocked down to a
modest 625MHz. Unlike the lesser Nvidia
parts, which feature fewer stream proces-
sors, the 4850 includes a full complement
of 800 stream processors paired with
40 texture units, just like the 4870. This
means the HD 4850 is at its best in shader-
heavy benchmarks such as Crysis.
At the $200 price point, this card’s
main competition is the old GeForce 8800
GT/9600 GT line of parts, against which it
compares favorably. In benchmarks that
are limited by shader performance,
the 4850 absolutely slaughters the
older GPUs. In memory-bandwidth-
limited benchmarks, the older GPUs
close the gap. While the benchmarks
we list are primarily geared toward
high-resolution screens, we also run
some lower-resolution tests—Crysis
on Very High chalked up a respect-able 15.3 fps, on High it averaged 28 fps.
Our image-quality tests didn’t show any
anomalies, and high-def video playback
was flawless.
For anyone riding an old DirectX 9-era
GPU, the HD 4850 is your ticket to full
DirectX 10 capability—and a more than ca-
pable upgrade from your old card. For folks
who already own a DirectX 10 card, there’s
really nothing to see here. – w i l l s m i t hVisiontek Radeon HD 4850
For less than $200 you can get a fairly competent DirectX 10 GPU
86 | MAXIMUMPC | oct 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com
verdict$200, http://www.visiontek.com7
cheap-and-easy
directX 10. Single slot.
Supports hdMi, hdcP,
and accelerated blu-
ray playback.not that much faster
than an 8800 Gt. conks
out at high resolutions,
aa/anisotropic filtering
levels.dr. horriblevisiontek radeon hd 4850bad horse3dMark vantage Game 1 (fps) 8.62 6.0
3dMark vantage Game 2 (fps) 7.34 5.69
Crysis (fps) 11.9 4.4
World in Conflict (fps) 11 16
3dMark06 Game 1 (fps) 29.3 25.2
3dMark06 Game 2 (fps) 23.9 23.3
Bconsists of a QX9800 CPU, an Intel X48-chipset motherboard, and 4GB of DDR3 est scores are bolded. Benchmarks are run on our videocard test bed, which
memory. All tests run at 1920x1200 with 4x AA and 16x anisotropic filtering enabled. Crysis is run at Very High settings.benchMarkS
radeon hd 4850 ev8800 GGa GeForcetvisiontek’s radeon hd 4850 deliv-
ers entry-level directX 10 perfor-
mance at a compelling price.