MSI R4850 512M Radeon HD 4850

HotHardware's Test System Intel Core 2 Duo Powered

**  Before getting to our test results, we should point out that the ASUS EN9800GTX TOP we used for reference testing, is overclocked to 755 MHz for the core (reference speed is 675 MHz), 1175 MHz for the memory (reference speed is 1100 MHz), and 1840 MHz for the shader clock (reference speed is 1688 MHz), which is actually a bit faster than the recently released GeForce 9800 GTX+.

3DMark Vantage

The latest version of Futuremark's synthetic 3D gaming benchmark, 3DMark Vantage, is specifically bound to Windows Vista-based systems because it uses some advanced visual technologies that are only available with DirectX 10, which isn't available on previous versions of Windows. 3DMark Vantage isn't simply a port of 3DMark06 to DirectX 10, though. With this latest version of the benchmark, Futuremark has incorporated two new graphics tests, two new CPU tests, several new feature tests, in addition to support for the latest PC hardware. We tested the graphics cards here with 3DMark Vantage's "Performance" preset option, which uses a resolution of 1280x1024.

The 3DMark Vantage results show the R4850 512M performing much better than the 256MB Radeon HD 3850, a bit better than the GeForce 9800 GTX, and right on par with the ASUS EN9800GTX TOP. At the same time, the Radeon HD 4870 and GeForce GTX 260 bested the R4850 512M by a considerable margin, but both cards cost $70-100 more than MSI's R4850.