Top 10 games Radeon 4870 1 GB & GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 test

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ATI Radeon HD 4870 1024MB

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ATI Radeon HD 4870 1024MB

So before we begin let's have a look at the two cards we'll be using in this test. From ATI we have their reference Radeon HD 4870 1024MB. It's the same card you receive when you purchase it in the store, as they hardly can be found customized or overclocked. It's an awesome little card though.

 

ATI Radeon
HD 4850

ATI Radeon
HD 4850 1GB

ATI Radeon
HD 3850
ATI Radeon
HD 4870
# of transistors

965 million

965 million

666 million 965 million

Stream Processing Units

800

800

320 800

Clock speed

625 MHz

625 MHz

670 MHz 750 MHz

Memory Clock

2000 MHz GDDR3 (effective)

1980 MHz GDDR3 (effective)

1.66 GHz GDDR3 (effective) 3600 MHz GDDR5 (effective)

Math processing rate (Multiply Add)

1000 GigaFLOPS

1200 GigaFLOPS

428 GigaFLOPS 1200 GigaFLOPS

Memory

512MB GDDR3

512MB GDDR3

512MB GDDR3 512MB1024/ GDDR5

Memory interface

256-bit

256-bit

256-bit 256-bit

As you guys know by now ATI's Radeon HD 4850/4870 are both using the same GPU (graphics processor). The codename for these chips is RV770. AMD put nearly a billion transistors into that GPU, which is now built upon a 55nm (260 mm2 Die size) production. The Radeon 4850/4870 series graphics processors have 800 scalar processors, if you are into this geek talk, you'll spot 10 SIMD clusters each carrying 80 32-bit Shader processors (this accumulates to 800). All these lovely little shader units like some memory bandwidth to work in, we call it VRAM, also known as video ram, aka frame buffer.

Since the 4870 series really digs that GDDR5 memory bandwidth, what's the cheapest thing to do to gain some extra performance? Increase the framebuffer volume. Now that by itself is not going to work miracles, yet in memory limited situations (loads of high quality textures, filtering and AA modes) it will help you here and there. This is where the 1024MB model has an advantage over the GeForce GTX 260 series, initially.

And a little bit of extra bite is all the product needs to get to fight that Core 216 card from NVIDIA. Here's the 1024MB Radeon HD 4870 that we are using today, gettin' warmed up in the test rig.

4870 1GB vs GTX 260 core 216 with Top 5 games

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