ATI Radeon HD 4000 Series discussion

[Extelleron]

Very good news if thats the HD4850, it does however show, just how much of a beast the GTX 280 is, if it can supposedly score over twice that amount on Crysis..

The HD4870 is what 20% faster, so your deffo not going to get playable performance @ 1920 x 1200 on that card, if the HD4870x2 scales exceptionally well, it might just get near GTX 280 in Crysis..

Both companies are coming out of this very well imo, Nvidia looks to be giving you an absolute beast of a single card and Ati is giving good bang for buck ( option I will be choosing )...

As waver said, the HD 4870 is supposed to be ~30% faster than the HD 4850 on average. I think it is likely that sometimes it will be more and sometimes it will be less; there is a 20% clock difference between the 4850 and 4870, and then the 4870 has 80% more bandwidth. In situations that require a lot of bandwidth (like Crysis @ 1920x1200) I think it is likely that the 4870 will pull ahead by more than 30%.

As for the validity of Crysis as a benchmark... IMO it is the only thing that matters right now, so yes I think it is an important benchmark. Crysis is the only thing I can't already run at maximum setting w/ AA+AF at my res of 1680x1050 with an 8800GTS 512MB. The only other thing is Call of Juarez in DX10, but it is still playable and anyway I don't think I will be replaying it. So to me, at this moment, no benchmark but Crysis is important. And I can't see that changing much later this year.... Fallout 3 will be based on the Oblivion engine, so it will likely be a breeze for modern cards. Far Cry 2 can't be more demanding than Crysis, especially since it is on consoles as well. Alan Wake is supposed to be more CPU-bound than GPU-bound, and given that we haven't heard anything for so long, it may be vaporware (sadly, was looking forward to it). Stalker: Clear Sky might be very demanding, but we'll have to wait and see.