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Introduction
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Although wrought with numerous delays, ATI finally launched their long-awaited Radeon HD 4870 graphics card on June 25, 2008. As it was the first graphics card to feature the spanking new GDDR5 memory, much was expected of the Radeon HD 4870.
Fortunately, ATI finally delivered what they promised their fans for years - NVIDIA-thumping performance at a competitive price point. Today, we will be taking a look at an example of this card from ASUS.
ASUS currently offers three different Radeon HD 4870 models - the basic EAH4870, the EAH4870/G game bundle kit and the top-of-the-line EAH4870 TOP overclocked card. The card we are reviewing is the ASUS EAH4870/G, which essentially consists of the basic EAH4870 card and the "Alone In The Dark" game.
Before we start with the actual review, let's take a look at how the Radeon HD 4870 compares against a few graphics cards.
|
Radeon HD |
GeForce |
Radeon HD |
GeForce |
GeForce |
GPU |
RV770 XT |
GT200 |
RV770 PRO |
G92 |
G92 |
Manufacturing |
55 nm |
65 nm |
55 nm |
55 nm |
65 nm |
Transistor |
956 Million |
1400 Million |
956 Million |
754 Million |
754 Million |
DirectX |
10.1 |
10 |
10.1 |
10 |
10 |
Interface |
PCIe 2.0 |
PCIe 2.0 |
PCIe 2.0 |
PCIe 2.0 |
PCIe 2.0 |
Stream Processors |
800 |
192 |
800 |
128 |
128 |
Textures Per Clock Cycle |
48 |
64 |
48 |
64 |
64 |
ROPs |
32 |
28 |
32 |
16 |
16 |
Vertex
Shader |
4.1 |
4.0 |
4.1 |
4.0 |
4.0 |
Pixel Shader |
4.1 |
4.0 |
4.1 |
4.0 |
4.0 |
Core Speed |
750 MHz |
576 MHz |
625 MHz |
738 MHz |
675 MHz |
Texture Fill Rate |
36,000 MTexels/s |
36,864 MTexels/s |
30,000 MTexels/s |
47,232 MTexels/s |
43,200 MTexels/s |
Pixel Fill Rate |
24,000 MPixels/s |
16,128 MPixels/s |
20,000 MPixels/s |
11,808 MPixels/s |
10,400 MPixels/s |
Memory
Bus |
256-bits |
448-bits |
256-bits |
256-bits |
256-bits |
Memory |
GDDR5 |
GDDR3 |
GDDR3 |
GDDR3 |
GDDR3 |
Memory Speed |
900 MHz |
999 MHz |
1000 MHz |
1100 MHz |
1100 MHz |
Memory |
115.20 GB/s |
111.89 GB/s |
64.00 GB/s |
70.40 GB/s |
70.40 GB/s |
Thanks to the use of quad-pumped GDDR5 memory, the Radeon HD 4870 has almost twice as much memory bandwidth as the Radeon HD 4850. It has a 63.6% advantage in memory bandwidth over its "first official competitor", the NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+, although its texture fillrate is 23.8% lower.
However, NVIDIA later readjusted their line-up to make the GeForce GTX 260 the new competitor to the Radeon HD 4870. As you can see from the specifications above, the two cards are far more evenly matched. The GeForce GTX 260 has a slight advantage in texture fillrate while the Radeon HD 4870 has a similarly slight advantage in memory bandwidth.
However, the Radeon HD 4870 also has a large pixel fillrate advantage. Will that make a big difference in real world performance? Well, we will find out later in this review. Now, let's take a look at the ASUS EAH4870/G kit.
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