I first bought a Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB quite a while ago now and I was very happy with the card. I wouldn't have any trouble playing games at near enough their maximum settings at a resolution of 1920x1200. However, then the card started playing up so I sent it back for a new one. Once again, my second card was also faulty so I asked if I could have a refund and then purchase a new card but from a different manufacturer.
After I received my refund, I went for the Powercolor ATI Radeon HD 4870 1024MB and to be completely honest, the only difference between the 512MB and the 1024MB variant was that games appeared a little smoother, not by a lot but enough to notice which would be due to the higher VRAM. That's not to say that the 512MB variant of the card was unplayable because it wasn’t, far from it.
May I ask why some people are so concerned about the frames per second they are getting and not so much how the actual games run? I just get the impression that the people who judge all their games just based on how many FPS they get and all they do is constantly look at the FPS counter and completely neglecting the actual game play. When in actual fact, if you judged how smooth the game runs on a particular set of settings instead of getting too concerned about how many FPS you are getting, I'm sure the game would seem much smoother running.
I understand that the higher the FPS will effectively result in smoother game play. However, it isn't always as clear cut as this. I tend to find quite a lot of people will want a specific number of FPS in a game, say for example 60 to be deemed playable and if they don't reach this number, they're not happy bunnies. In reality though, even if you don't get say for example, a constant 60 FPS the game could still and probably will be playable but because they are so concerned about the actual number, it will appear, due to the counter, relatively unplayable to them. If you judge the actual game play though, I"m sure it's perfectly playable.
If we take Crysis for example which I can play at a resolution of 1920x1200 and everything on the "Very High" settings and it's pretty playable with the following system:
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 3.4GHz
ATI Radeon 4870 1024MB @ stock settings
4GB of RAM @ 780MHz
Admittedly, it's not silky smooth but it's definitely very playable without a doubt. However, if you purely judged the games performance by the FPS you are getting, then I would suspect a lot of people would be disappointed and it would appear that the game would be pretty unplayable and yet, it honestly isn't. I understand that people have different expectations and what is playable to one person may not be to another but I hope most people can see what I'm trying to get at.
What are other people's thoughts about this?
