FYI, I've just updated the theoretical GPU capacity table in this review to correct the fill rate numbers for the GeForce GTX 260. The revised numbers are slightly lower. The performance results remain unaffected.

274w load total power consumption for the whole system using a HD4870.
448w load total power consumption for the whole system using HD4870 Crossfire.
448w - 274w =174w

So the power consumption of a single HD4870 @load is around 174w
174w/12v= 14.5amps
So it draws somewhere around 14.5 amps at load

Of course that isn't 100% accurate but I'm sure its close...
AMD rates the HD4870 @ 160W TDP

Single slot - no way,
sticking with 9800GTX, just overclocking it more and more.
Do NOT see any ATIs in my future based on a few of older experiences with drivers, etc.

"We may revisit the image quality issue again before long, though. I'd like to look more closely at the impact of those trilinear optimizations in motion rather than in screenshots or test patterns." !!!

I don't know if you read my post in the last news snip about AMDs new released drivers bringing performance updates, but I believe AMD is cutting corners later on after people do all the image quality tests as things seem to look worse and worse with each patch.

Similarly, I own a R3870 and if you play WoW, look at the water in Stormwind or the lava in Ironforge under the bridge and there is this jagged lightning bolt like pattern where the textures are just plain missing from them and all the other textured water/lava looks to be of very low quality despite having all the settings on high. Turning AA on/off doesn't change this.

"In fact, this is the first teraflop-capable GPU, with a theoretical peak of a cool one teraflops in the Radeon HD 4850 and up to 1.2 teraflops in the Radeon HD 4870. Nvidia's much larger GeForce GTX 280 falls just shy of the teraflop mark."

Wow, way to rub that one in. I'm sure that has someone at marketing cursing.

"Meanwhile, the chip's internal bandwidth is twice that of the previous generation—a provision necessary, Hartog said, to keep pace with the amount of data coming in from GDDR5 memory."

What, manufacturers actually increasing their chips performance in order to actually utilize faster memory, who would've thought?!?!

scores are good, prices are good.. heat not so much. perhaps the fans need to spin a little faster on those cards. I dont see how those temps would help lead to a long life.

it'll be interesting to see how the 4870 x2 does ... hopefully ATI continues to improve the drivers.

If I was in the market for a card right now I'd definitely be looking at the 4870. However, those temps do scare me.

BTW Scott, did you ever get around to testing power consumption at 160/500 core/mem idle?

It does seem to me as if shadows in Crysis are not as sharp on my 4850 as I remembered them from playing on my 8800GTS (G80) last year (everything on High).

Shadows in Mass Effect also look splotchy on the 4850, but I am unable to compare with the 8800 on this game, so for all I know, that could be how they're supposed to look.

I do know that nv has always had the edge with hardware shadow support with stencil shadows.

Can anyone confirm if there is any IQ difference in shadows between red and green?

I am not tryin to be a nitpickin pain in the AZZZ but why didn't you guys show Crysis at 1680 x 1050............AND...............I would have loved to see the 8800 GT in there...Otherwise I already own the HD 4850 thanks to scott's Mule Kickin analogy last week!

Dang guys, we're pushing the 300-comment barrier.

Thats a bit of a one eyed point of view there Meadows LOL
If anyone is know for cheating on 3D benchmarks...the name NVidia springs to mind first with most people I'd wager.

Quote wikipedia:
Nvidia also began to clandestinely replace pixel shader code in software with hand-coded optimized versions with lower accuracy, through detecting what program was being run. These "tweaks" were especially noticed in benchmark software from Futuremark. In 3DMark03 it was found that Nvidia had gone to extremes to limit the complexity of the scenes through driver shader changeouts and aggressive hacks that prevented parts of the scene from even rendering at all.[10] This artificially boosted the scores the FX series received. Side by side analysis of screenshots in games and 3DMark03 showed noticeable differences between what a Radeon 9800/9700 displayed and what the FX series was doing.[10] Nvidia also publicly attacked the usefulness of these programs and the techniques used within them in order to undermine their influence upon consumers. It should however be noted that ATI also created a software profile for 3DMark03.[11] In fact, this is also a frequent occurrence with other software, such as games, in order to work around bugs and performance quirks. With regards to 3DMark, Futuremark began updates to their software and screening driver releases for these optimizations.

Both Nvidia and ATI have optimized drivers for tests like this historically. However, Nvidia went to a new extreme with the FX series. Both companies optimize their drivers for specific applications even today (2008), but a tight rein and watch is kept on the results of these optimizations by a now more educated and aware user community

And the defections begin...

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/display/20080626074725_Nvidia_s_..._In_Board_Partners_Start_Producing_ATI_Graphics_...[bs.com]

Does anyone know what temperature will actually damage the card? If these relatively high temperatures don't do any damage then I don't see what all the fuss is about.

And I don't care about statements like "higher temps shorten lifetime" unless you have some quantifiable evidence to go with it.

WOW... should've waited for the 4870... don't know WAT to do with my 9800 gtx.., wipe the floor sounds good. oh well time to save up and put couple of 4870 into crossfire...

Officially hate nvidia now... well until they come out and say oh whoops, we forgot on the gtx 280, we were holding back bunch of stuff, only half of the die is being used, the other half was just sitting there generating HEAT because out programmer got too lazy. then drop prices and maybe i'll go back to nvidia again...

... and no i'm not anyone's fanboy, i go for best value or just high enough performance at a decent price point

This is awesome for the consumer. I however will still hold on to my 8800 GTX Sli's for the next few months maybe even a year, since the new 177.26 drivers I modified for Crysis plays much better and Sli is working finally.

Even though these chips are great they still do not improve much over the G80, just shows you how much of a leap forward the G80 was and after 2 years it can still compete, that is just incredible.

I am glad that AMD/ATi finally got Nvidia by the balls again! I was never happy to pay over $500 for a high performance card, it is just silly to expect that especially considering that in SA you pay at 12x the dollar price and the official exchange rate is 8x.

Man, this has been one exciting year. We all have Nehalem to look forward to, and if AMD can get Shanghai right then boy are they back in business. nVidia can still put the fight to AMD though. All they really need to do is die shrink the 200's so they can lower prices and slap some GDDR5 on there. Then I think those chips can be all they were truly meant to be.

Also, I've been reading online that resetting the HSF for the 4850 with some new paste does wonders for it. Any one want to confim that?

Not to be too nit-picky, but several things in this review really bothered me.
I didn't see a single mention of future havok support, while physx practically got it's own page.
I guess it doesn't matter since physics support isn't mainstream yet.

And what's with 3dmark, I thought most review sites were staying away from it?
also, using 8.5 drivers in the game benchmarks, when 8.6 is out.

Honestly, I think Anand's review was better. less tainted.
This review gave me the impression of having a nvidia undertone, in an ATI review.
Seriously, a whole page on physx, and you don't mention havok once. w/e.

Other than that, I thought the rest of the review was good.

I want to know if there ill be a 4850 GDDR5 or not. That would be the perfect pice/performance and with aftermarket cooling... :)

I'm trrying not to vibrrrate off the computer chairrrrr :)
ATI HD 4870 FTW!

It's funny how they sometimes mentioning that they fear competitors get info on cards too early, but the one thing I notice is that that great anisotropic filtering nvidia added 2 or 3 generations back still didn't come to the ATI camp, they still have that severe angle dependant stuff, not that it ever bothered me in games though.
All in all ATI really surprised me, as did nvidia, nvidia with not supporting DX10.1 and not moving forward as much as suspected and ATI for moving way more forward for a lower price than expected.

As I've said before, PhysX scores aren't unfair.

- If you want to benchmark a complete system: leave it on, or check the "disable PPU" box in 3DMark Vantage's options section.
- If you want to benchmark a CPU, disable PPUs.
- If you want to benchmark videocards - well, you'll be looking at the GPU subscore then anyway, so all this is moot in that case.

Two HD 4850 cards in Crossfire is still the best bang/buck deal I've seen in a very long time.

No mention of Cinema 2.0! Why?

I've read the review and I've been reading a lot of stuff here on the site, so I decided to register - this is my 1st post! :)

Anyway, I've been also watching the Youtube Cinema 2.0 presentation and wish AMD had some more info about it by now. This would help me decide if I want to get the card or maybe stick it out with the 7600 GT a lil longer to see if things get more interesting.

Like someone was also saying here, too bad they didn't show anything with their Physics implementation, althought I read someone already did a driver that allows AMD cards to use the nvidia Physics in benchmark, so right there we know that Physics is to stay.

P.S. I saw a review of the 4870 on a different site (cant remember the name) and someone strapped a custom heat sink/fan on it and the temperature went down by 50% or more. That is very welcoming news indeed.

Glad to have signed up to be a member, see you guys out there, between the lines :)

Now all ATI needs is are great companies to supply cards & warranty & support & user friendliness, etc. such as what Nvidia has with eVGA and XFX.
i.e. Imagine if eVGA or XFX putting out ATI HD4850/4870, then you could just change the GPU's cooler (even WC) to get good temps on top of nice OCs ... and the warranty still applies ... and it would remain under warranty for a long time, not just 1 year! (3 years I think is all that is really needed, but longer is always nice).

This reminds me of the Radeon 1800 to 1900 series transition. Second generation vastly outperforming the first.

I just installed the HD 4850 into my Dell Vostro 200 tower w./ 500w PSU 1.5 gigs Ram and Core 2 Duo E46000 @ 2.4ghz and ran the fly be in game GPU Benchmark at 1680 x 1050 NO A/A with everything set to High and it hit 34.5 frames per second a solid 10 frames per second higher than the 8800 GT setup I ran earlier! (WIN XP DX9).

I just ran this again with 4x AA and got 24.45 FPS! This is considered playable by most.. Finally the Crysis card is here!

This card rocks!

Dell Vostro E4600@ stock 2.4ghz HD 4850 (vistiontek @ stock bt for $150 @ Best Buy last Friday) 1.5g Ram @ 667 500w PSU 22" Dell LCD

You know I read a few comments in this thread that presume reviewers have a bias toward one company or another but really its hard not to get excited when great products come out. I dont think Damage's review was tilted in anyway but he's definitely excited, its news like this that brings readers to the site. Just look at the number of comments in this thread, 200+ in 2 days. Most of us have a soft spot for AMD because lately there hasn't been too many players in mainstream computing. Matrox died a long time ago, VIA is hardly in the picture, S3 is trying to cash in on the lucrative sub $50 graphics category etc etc.. so it always comes back to Intel, AMD(ATi) and Nvidia. I for one am greatful we still have a choice.

I see a $150 or less 4850 in my immediate future.

Great review Scott. Nice to see AMD/ATI back in the game.

Two things I always like to bring up with these ATI cards that Nvidia cant yet touch.
1)Built-in HDMI with Multi-channel 5.1 surround audio
2)Better multi-monitor support.

I'll gladly give up a couple of FPS for that stuff.

Also, I can see a 4870 X2, coupled with some new AMD chipsets and a new 4,6, or 8 core CPU, and all of a sudden the Spider Platform looks more like Lloth.
http://www.forgottenkingdoms.com/deities/lloth.shtml

Hurray for the Under dog!

1. Thank you for doing HL2 benchmarks. Many sites dont bench that game any more. But its still the the most relevant game because its the most played, in one mod form or another.

2. Can you please bring back UT3 benchies, not only does it support physics, but it is also the engine in many upcoming titles. Plus it is also its own engine.

3. thank you for including 2900xt, i still have one.

4. would have liked to see 8800 gt sli in benchmarks

5. can you crossfire 4850 with 4870? if so, can you run the benchies.

Btw, i think you had a better review than anand this time.

cant wait for nehalem.

Umm... page 3... first html link:
"...street prices seem to jibe with that"

uhh... I think you mean "jive"

Oh boy, Nvidia's executives should be embarrassed for trying to stretch its architect for so long to avoid R&D costs.

At least now they are giving engineers the highlight to go develop something superior to G8x and R6xx/R7xx families. ;) We will not see its fruits for a while thought.

In meantime, Nvidia can wage a price war and it sorely needs to cut prices on GT2xx line. Especially GT260 ($299) and GT280 ($399).

No one gives a yawn to ATI, err, AMD for this time. ;-)