HD4850 review

4800 series are the latest offering by Amd-Ati. The 4850 along with their current flagship product the 4870 was an highly anticipated graphics card solution, knowing that it would be priced aggressively….and it is now, infact making it the best bang for buck enthusiast gpu solution available.


I have two cards for this review to compare w/ - a 4850 and a 8800GTS 512; which is almost equal in performance to the 9800GTX. Infact, clock per clock, the 8800GTS 512 wins the lead…but that’s not important here.


4850 is at a less than 200$ price point now. It was first rumored to to have 480 shader processors, the parallel processing units that make up the core’s processing power. But it is now known that such wasn’t the case. The shader processors were maybe rumored like that by ati themselves, to present to their competitors an unexpected surprise later on. While nvidia earned much by their RnD products which did work out great, Ati wasn’t having a great time around…but they might have been like the duck that seems unflattered on the water surface floating on it, but does a great deal paddling all the time…its little feet responsible for the thrust and turns it desires.

In my opinion, Nvidia made a mistake by choosing to make the ‘fastest single gpu solution around’ w/o taking into account ATLEAST how fast its going to be, lets not talk about those specific target die size records breaks and totally ignore power consumption(we welcome higher power consumptions and prefer it over lower). Had been the ati offering not as it is now, i.e., 480SP then the gtx 280 would have shone somewhat(somewhat because knowing enthusiasts were tired of g80 core shrinks and optimizations and releases as a card) as a new card, even though performance differences over the previous generations is not at all reasonable(see the jump from 7900gtx to 8800gtx), even if there are some major architectural differences over the g80 and the gt200 or the d10-u. now the fastest solutions price equaled to twice the price of the something-near-to-the fastest solution, the 4870. so they got into a situation…their perspective followed for sometime now is being paid of.

4850/4870 use the same rv770 core, the difference lies in clocks and in the memory architectures they are equipped with.