ATI Radeon HD 4850 Performance Preview Page 3

By SimHQ on June 25, 2008 in _technology2, hide

Test System Details

The test system detailed below was installed with Vista Ultimate Edition x64 SP1 and consisted of the following components:

Intel E8500 Core 2 Duo (3.16GHz)
ASUS Maximus Formula X38 chipset motherboard
4GB OCZ Reaper DDR2 1066 memory
WD VelociRaptor 300GB hard drive
Plextor PX-712S DVD drive
Creative Labs SoundBlaster X-Fi sound card
Dell 3007WFP 30” LCD
Enermax 550W PSU

The X38 Express chipset supports dual x16 PCI Express 2.0 ports. The latest BIOS and chipset and add-in component drivers were installed and all test applications patched. The control panels for both manufacturers’ GPUs were set to application-controlled for features such as anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering whenever the test application allowed for control over those settings; otherwise, they were forced via the control panels. All testing was conducted with 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering enabled and high quality filtering was used at all times. FRAPS 2.9.4 was installed to record frame rates for applications that do not produce their own performance results. The following resolutions were used:

1024×768
1280×1024
1680×1050
1920×1200

SimHQ used the following applications for our testing today and details per application configuration can be found in the test results section below:

3DMark Vantage
Crysis
Call of Duty 4
World in Conflict
Race Driver: GRID

Despite its $200 MSRP, the Radeon HD 4850 is a fairly powerful GPU and because of its high theoretical performance potential SimHQ decided to test the above applications under high settings. Driver versions used for each board were as follows:

Radeon HD 3870: Catalyst 8.6 Hotfix
Radeon HD 4850: Catalyst 8.6 Hotfix
GeForce 8800 GTX: 175.16

Again, 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering were both enabled as defaults during all testing.

You can see the size difference of the three boards below.