The Fastest 3D Cards Go Head-To-Head

[df1z]

Absoultely amazing review. Incredibly in-depth look at all of our choices out there today. And your conclusion made me even more happy. I just purchased 2 of Sapphire's Toxis 4850s. It's going to be quite an upgrade from my GeForce 8800 GTS. I'm looking forward to being able to play at 1920x1200 with stable numbers!

 

[San Pedro]

Looks like the results for SLI and Crossfire were switched with the single card results. . .

 

[Duncan NZ]

Not a bad article, really comprehensive.
My one complaint? Why use that CPU when you know that the test cards are going to max it out? Why not a quad core OC'ed to 4GHz? It'd give far more meaning to the SLI results. We don't want results that we can duplicate at home, we want results that show what these cards can do. Its a GPU card comparason, not a complain about not having a powerful enough CPU story.

Oh? And please get a native english speaker to give it the once over for spelling and grammar errors, although this one had far less then many articles posted lately.

 

[elbert]

No 4870x2 in CF so its the worlds top end Nvidia vs ATI mid to low end.

 

[Lightnix]

It'd be a good article if you'd used a powerful enough CPU and up to date Radeon drivers (considering we're now up to 8.8 now), I mean are those even the 'hotfix' 8.6's or just the vanilla drivers?

 

[elbert]

Version AMD Catalyst 8.6? Why not just say i'm using ATI drivers with little to no optimizations for the 4800's. This is why the CF benchmarks tanked.

 

[Guest]

at 1280, all of the highend cards were CPU limited. at that resolution, you need a 3.2-3.4 c2d to feed a 3870... this article had so much potential, and yet... so much work, so much testing, fast for nothing, because most of the results are very cpu limited (except 1920@AA).

 

[wahdangun]

WTF, hd4850 SHOULD be a lot faster than 9600 GT and 8800 GT even tough they have 1Gig of ram

 

[mjam]

No 4870X2 and 1920 X 1200 max resolution tested. How about finishing the good start of an article with the rest of it...

 

[Guest]

I agree, the 4870 X2 should have been in there and should have used the updated drivers. Good article but I think you fell short on finishing it.

 

[Guest]

@pulasky - Rage much? It's called driver issues you dumbass. Some games are more optimised for multicard setups than others, and even then some favour SLi to Crossfire. And if you actually READ the article rather than let your shrinken libido get the better of you, you'll find that Crossfire does indeed work in CoD4.

Remember, the more you know.

 

[buzzlightbeer]

isnt forceware 177.41 out for gt200 series? so they are using a recent driver for the nvidia cards yet not for the ATI cards...plus yes would have to agree with wahdangun the 4850 is alot faster then the 9600gt and the 8800gt i have 2 friends with both cards with q6600s one at 3.2 (9600gt) and the other at 3.0 (4850) and the 4850 machine destroys the other one even with a lower clocked cpu
but yes the article was off to a great start, maybe throw some vantage in there as well?

 

[chesterman]

agree with the others. u guys should use a more recent driver for ati/amd cards, use a more game-effective cpu and REALLY should have put the 4870x2 on the fight

 

[masterwhitman]

[citation][nom]elbert[/nom]Version AMD Catalyst 8.6? Why not just say i'm using ATI drivers with little to no optimizations for the 4800's. This is why the CF benchmarks tanked.[/citation]

Precisely; several other websites tested with 8.7 and 8.8 long before this article was published. Why couldn't you? Look at the 8.6 release notes; it doesn't even mention the HD4000 series cards as supported devices.

Brilliant guys.

 

[Guest]

and why use vista when noone that considers itself a gamer(even casual) touches with a ten-foot pole.
This is another reason why the results are tanked, in XP you get 15% more performance compared to these values

 

[roynaldi]

NVISION comes around and IRONicallY, a 36 page article is produced that is magically in favor of, whats that, NVIDIA!!!

After having the Mythbusters appear, you would think this would be the most comprehensive, "scientific," factual, and update article meeting Tom's usual standards.... I didn't finish reading this.

 

[xrodney]

Using old drivers with no optimalisation at all fo newest card whitch was released months ago seems too strange to me. Also temperature results for 48xx are quite oposite reality, at least when compare to 8.8 catalyst.
(82 temperature in 2D 69 in 3D with no fanfix)

 

[jitpublisher]

Pretty good, finally. Wish you would have have used an overclocked Quad so the newer GPU's could show their full potentianl, and you really should have used the latest drivers, but I give this article 2 thumbs up. Lot of good information in here.

 

[Haiku214]

Well the main reason why they don't have the 4870x2 and the latest drivers is simply because they made this article a couple of weeks ago. If you could just imagine how long and tedious it is to produce all these data and results. It's just sad that after finally finishing the article, a lot of new stuff has already happened(new drivers and the x2).

 

[jameskangster]

First I want to say that the article itself is not bad at all.
Also, I can understand why TH didn't have time to use 8.8 since it was released publicly on August 20, 2008 (Although ATI would have gladly released a beta version to TH for testing purposes).

However, AMD publicly released stable Catalyst 8.7(internal version 8.512) on July 21, 2008. That's more than a month ago. It has numerous improvements (for example, CF performance increase, improved stability and performance under Vista). To be honest, most of the improvements range from 4% to 15%. (In CF case, up to 1.7 X scaling)

TH has rarely been unfair and/or inaccurate and they always owned up to their mistakes before, and I trust them to re-test ATI products with at least 8.7 if not 8.8 to continue to uphold their values and integrity.

 

[outlw6669]

So, to start off with, this article is much better than many of the other recent reviews. I feel you put some thought into it and for the most part it is good. I found the comparative performance charts at the end interesting. Have you thought of changing the GPU charts in a similar fashion?

Now on to my criticism.

I can understand how you want to keep the results homogeneous with previous results but if you already know that a stock QX6800 will bottleneck the system, be proactive in fixing it. At the very least you should have done a small segment of the review showing the newer cards with a quad core overclocked to 4.0Ghz.

Also, if you have ever read any of the older Toms articles, you would know that you can still minimise the bottleneck from a slow GPU bye raising the resolution. Perhaps you should test the fastest cards at the highest resolutions?

I can also understand why you did not use the latest nVidia drivers. It takes time to create a review of this scale and the GF8/9 series drivers have been stable for some time. As the GT 200 series brings no new features to the table, they would needed little optimisation for their newer cards allowing the slightly dated drivers to perform nicely.

What I can not understand is why you would use ATI's 8.6 drivers??
The 8.7 drivers have been out for more than a month bringing quite a few fixes/optimisations with it. I understand it probably took more than 9 days to complete all of these benchmarks (today is the 29th, the 8.8 drivers were officially released on the 20th) but you should have called ATI and asked for their latest drivers. The 8.8 drivers were leaked at least a week before the official release which means, if you could nurture a relationship with the people you review, they could/probably would have provided them to you. There is still no excuse I can see for testing with the old 8.6 drivers. Seriously, it does not even have official support for the 48X0 cards...

From the title of the article,"The Fastest 3D Cards Go Head-To-Head", I would have assumed that you would have been testing the Fastest 3D cards? What happened to your 4870x2? As you have already attempted to review it, we know you have your hands on one. How can you claim to review the "Fastest 3D Cards" and still leave out the fastest card?

In summation, I liked many things from this article. The layout was nice and a little more technical than we have been seeing as of late. I enjoyed the comparison charts at the end and I think you should adopt a similar method for the CPU and GPU charts. I would have thought this was an excellent and well thought out article if it had not been for the glaring and obvious deficiencies in reason. I give you credit for stepping Toms in the right direction. With a little more unbiased comparison, critical thinking and common sense I could come to see reviews such as this in a very positive light.

 

[Pejman]

The 3870 and 3850 is faster than 4870 and 4850?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

 

[JohnOttCan]

Any reason why GeForce 9800 GX2 SLI was not included?

 

[malveaux]

Heya,

I like this article. Finally. I was waiting to find a good comprehensive set of benches between these cards. It's still very obvious that the aged 8800gt 1giger is a monster in SLI compared to the flagship cards and they're still way cheaper ($119 at tiger, makes it $240 for the setup) as the flagship setups are twice as expensive, but don't perform that much better. I love the approach of performance per cost because frankly, a $800 computer performs just as good as a $4,000 computer if you look at the actual frame rate differences of like... 10? Lol. Great read!

Very best,

 

[ovaltineplease]

Well the main reason why they don't have the 4870x2 and the latest drivers is simply because they made this article a couple of weeks ago. If you could just imagine how long and tedious it is to produce all these data and results. It's just sad that after finally finishing the article, a lot of new stuff has already happened(new drivers and the x2).

Quite regrettably you can't do this many benchmarks in the blink of an eye - this is a pretty large and comprehensive test.

Cat 8.6 and Forceware 177.41 is good enough - those are hardly horrible drivers for either card. People like to cry and howl "oh but the 8.6 isn't the best ATI driver" - yea well guess what, the 177.41 has a BIG downclocking in 3d mode glitch which makes the card performance tank more than a "lack of optimization" from the ATI driver could ever hope to produce.

This downclocking glitch is fixed in the more recent forcewares and they produce /dramatically/ increased benchmark results compared to 177.41 - especially in dx9 test or tests with no AA enabled, the downclock affected this testing most.

All in all, good article - but as others said its a crying shame a higher clocked CPU wasn't used to show what the dual card configurations can really do.