AMD’s New Radeon HD 4850 Breaks Expectations
The Radeon HD 4850 is AMD’s upcoming budget powerhouse and little brother to the upcoming Radeon HD 4870. The architecture details are being kept secret for now, but PC Perspective was given a card to benchmark and review.
At this point, we know is that the Radeon HD 4850 is a single-slot, 512 MB card with two DVI outputs and one DVI to HDMI converter. According to our good friend GPU-Z, the HD 4850 runs on 55-nm technoology, similar to that of the upcoming NVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX+. It has a 625 MHz core clock and 993 MHz GDDR3 memory. These numbers don’t seem like much when compared to similarly priced Intel cards, but benchmarks show that clock speed isn’t everything.
This card ran most games just as well, if not faster than its Intel counterparts. It lagged behind in CAll of Duty 4 but surprisingly surpassed the 9800GTX in Crysis. The same can be said with benchmarking programs like 3DMark06.
Keep in mind that this is the budget friendly version of AMD’s new flagship GPU, the Radeon HD 4870. So with the added push of competition, we may see Intel stun us again like they did with the original 8800GTX. Or they’ll fall back to the superiority that is AMD. Either way, this should get interesting.
[ Via Pc Perspective ]
