Exhaustive Performance Anaylasis of ATI 4800 platform

[Truckchase!]

As some guys on this board know, I've developed an automated testing suite of games, and I've taken to benching on ATI's latest offering. My focus will be on the following:

- overall performance
- Performance hit for anti aliasing
- Performance hit for anisotropic filtering
- architecture bottleneck analysis (Gpu vs. mem)

My first test subject is a HIS 4850 with stock cooling. For the sake of comparing to ATI's last gen, I used a heavily overclocked 2900xt. This should be relevant enough to be interesting vs. the 3870 as well.

For anyone who's interested in the raw data, please inquire and I'll send it to you if interested. It's just to much to post here. I have run my full test suite @ the following resolutions/aa/aniso: 1600x1200@ 4/16, 4/0, 0/16, 0/0, 1024x768@ 4/16. The games include Quake2,Quake3,UT2k4FlyBy,UT2k4BotMatch,Comanche4,F arCry,Half Life 2,Serious Sam 2,Doom 3,Half Life 2 Lost Coast,Quake 4,Splinter Cell Chaos Theory,Supreme Commander,Company of Heroes DX9,Company of Heroes DX10,Crysis DX9 High,Crysis DX10 High,Crysis DX10 Very High. Crysis results are not complete due to test reliability issues. (thanks to copy protection bombing) Cards tested sofar are 2900xt@918/918 and 4850@625/993, 700/993, 625/1115, 700/1115. All tests run on all cards at all resolutions. The underlying system is entirely consistent for all runs. (See sig) Let me know if you would like any of that data presented in any special way and I'll format it as such.

First, overclocked results of the overclocked 2900xt vs. the overclocked 4850.

NOTE: This first test isn't fair. The 2900xt is overclocked (the core at least, which is the restricted part on this card) by 24%, while the 4850 by only 12%. This just gives a good general idea of what the new 4800 series is capable of. (which as we all know is quite a bit)


The reason this data should be interesting to most is the drastic performance impact of Anti aliasing (I'll directly statistically correlate this in a post to follow) on the previous generation of cards vs. this generation. The 4800 series handles AA much better.

More to follow....