ATI Radeon HD 4850 and 4870: RV770 Has Arrived

Name: ATI Radeon HD 4850 and 4870: RV770 Has Arrived - Page 7
Brand: ATI

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, June 25, 2008, 12:00 AM EDT

Half Life 2: Episode 2

DirectX Gaming Performance

Half Life 2:
Episode 2

Thanks to the dedication of hardcore PC gamers and a huge mod-community, the original Half-Life was one of the most successful first person shooters of all time. And courtesy of an updated game engine, gorgeous visuals, and intelligent weapon and level designs, Half Life 2 became just as popular. Episode 2 - the most recent addition to the franchise - offers a number of visual enhancements including better looking transparent texture anti-aliasing. These tests were run at resolutions of 1,920 x 1,200 and 2,560 x 1,600 with 4X anti-aliasing and 16X anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently. Color correction and HDR rendering were also enabled in the game engine as well. We used a custom recorded timedemo to benchmark all cards for these tests.

Our custom Half Life 2 benchmark tells an interesting story. First, it appears that the NVIDIA configurations used more CPU resources, which resulted in somewhat lower scores for the two- and three-way SLI setups in the lower-resolution tests than the Radeon HD 4800 series CrossFire configurations. Overall, the Radeon HD 4850 finished just shy of the mark set by the GeForce 9800 GTX+, but the Radeon HD 4870 abd GeForce GTX 260 actually traded victories here. So far, the Radeon HD 4870 has proven to be a strong competitor to the GTX 260, even though it is expected to sell for about $100 less.

Tags: ATI, Radeon, HD, rv770, 4850, 4870, Radeon HD, ATI Radeon, arrive, Ive, AR, and

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com