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Benchmarks - 8800GTX to 4870

Mortster

Mortster

Mortster

Associate
Joined
10 Dec 2003
Posts
651
Hi there,

Earlier in the week I couldn't decide if the upgrade from my BFG 8800GTX OC to a Powercolour ATI HD4870 was worth it, kept writing down analysis of other benchmarks and eventually summarised the jump in performance should be somewhere around the 25-30% mark. Anyway a couple of pints one lunchtime, I got back to work, and thought what the hell and clicked on that BUY button ;)

Managed to fit the card today, and I was really rather surprised how well made the card felt, very solid and nicely finished off. I had spent the previous few days grabbing as many benchmarks as I could with my 8800GTX still installed.

My rig is as follows

E6400 @ 3.2GHz
2Gb Crucial Ballistix DDR2-1066
Asus P5b Deluxe
Enermax Liberty 620W

Windows XP SP2 32 bit

1. BFG 8800GTX OC with Forceware 175.16
2. Powecolour ATI HD4870 with CCC 8.6 + Hotfix

Here are the results :






Conclusions/Findings
--------------------

I'm very pleased with the card particularly the overall IQ which is really outstanding. I always worry when I chop and change between NVidia and ATI as to the differences in IQ/Rendering, but ATI have certainly got back to their previous levels of quality. Crysis just looks amazing !

I did find some rather strange results in some of the Crysis tests. That's why I have included the minimum framerate data. For example, the 1920x1200 2xAA test shows a drop in minimum framerate from 17.45 to 10.79 and it was rather painful watching this bench, a few times the timedemo nearly grinded to a complete halt. If I had to guess I would say this was evidence of the framebuffer becoming exhausted, it would be nice to compare this with a 1Gb 4870.

Overall though I've got some impressive gains across all the games I tried. Particularly impressed with the performance in GRID, and the ability to just apply 8xAA in the DMC4 bench without hardly any performance hit !

The 4870x2 is going to be a monster !

Welcome back ATI !
 
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One more thing though, after applying the 8.6 CCC + hotfix driver (after running driver sweeper and getting rid of all the old NVidia files) I now have an unknown PCI Device in device manager.

I've tried scanning through the ATI installation files for a driver match but no such luck... Is it maybe the HDMI-AUDIO driver ?
 
sweet. i was wondering whether to go from a the exact same GTX to a 4870. 25% performance increase isnt enough though to warrant it for me.

I'm gonna wait for the x2's :D should be a good 50%+ increase over my GTX.
 
To be my usual look on the negative side I'd want an increase selling a gtx for £100 or less - postage and paying £180 + postage for a replacement the question is is the increase worth £100 + ?
 
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I'm not convinced at all even though I sold my 8800gt and am on a barton 2800 and 7600gs still playing coh 1680-1050 all low details but just as enjoyable quite glad my funds are tied up in an order cancellation I certainly don't think the 4870 represents such great value as everyone else seems to now I've had time to think.

So black and white is a £190 graphics card double the performance of a card you could possibly soon pick up for £80 and the answer is a resounding No.
Remember it's only great because of the prices of nvidia cards, but ,who can resist the new shiny things I certainly cant.
 
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C64 said:
I certainly don't think the 4870 represents such great value as everyone else seems to now I've had time to think.

Remember it's only great because of the prices of nvidia cards, but ,who can resist the new shiny things I certainly cant.
Click to expand...

Spot on, couldnt agree more ;)
 
I'm afraid I forgot to bench my 8800GTX at 1280x1024 in Crysis, but here are some results from benching the 4870 at 1280x1024 DX9 All High Details - benchmark_gpu demo

1280x1024 0xAA Min = 30.39 Avg = 57.16
1280x1024 2xAA Min = 31.46 Avg = 47.97
1280x1024 4xAA Min = 31.64 Avg = 46.39

Nice to see a near 60fps result ! Also another proof point that the AA efficiency of these 4870's is very good. No hit at all going from 2x to 4x ;)
 
C64 said:
I'm not convinced at all even though I sold my 8800gt and am on a barton 2800 and 7600gs still playing coh 1680-1050 all low details but just as enjoyable quite glad my funds are tied up in an order cancellation I certainly don't think the 4870 represents such great value as everyone else seems to now I've had time to think.

So black and white is a £190 graphics card double the performance of a card you could possibly soon pick up for £80 and the answer is a resounding No.
Remember it's only great because of the prices of nvidia cards, but ,who can resist the new shiny things I certainly cant.
Click to expand...

I think the key thing here is to sell before the new cards come out. I sold my 9800 GTX the sunday before the 4870 launch for £160. Obviously I would not get that now. Chopping and changing is the most cost effective way of keeping upto date and its also the most fun.

For the record I paid just over £180 for the 9800 GTX inc delivery.
 
Jono8 said:
sweet. i was wondering whether to go from a the exact same GTX to a 4870. 25% performance increase isnt enough though to warrant it for me.

I'm gonna wait for the x2's :D should be a good 50%+ increase over my GTX.
Click to expand...

Well even if the 4870x2 was only 50% quicker than a single 4870 the gain would be 87.5% (gtx base 100, single 4870 = 125 therfore 4870x2 = 187.5)

In some games 4870 in xfire showing 100% improvement over a single card so in those a 4870x2 would be a 150% gain.:eek:

And rumours say the 4870x2 is 15% quicker than two 4870's in xfire so make that a 80% to 187% gain:eek:

Now that will be worth an upgrade from a 8800GTX :D
 
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mike gunnz said:
Spot on, couldnt agree more ;)
Click to expand...

I disagree. It beats a 8800GTX by 25-40% for £175 when the 8800GTX was still selling for £300 a few months ago.

If somebody had told you then you could have that much performance for £175 you would have laughed you head off.
 
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Its great value for money, Just because its twice the price that a second hand 8800GTX potentially is does not mean its not worth it, just because we pay over double does not mean we get twice the performance, just like crossfire/SLi we dont get twice the performance.


Great thread btw, I could learn a few from this when trying to benchmark and show the results, puts my attempt in the other thread to shame :cool:
 
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