Sapphire HD 4870 Problems

[Guppy]

I just bought a Radeon 4870 512MB from the link below:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sapphire-111...202167&sr=8-11

So that I could upgrade from my 8800GTS 512MB but I am not getting the performance increase I expected. Crysis Warhead plays fine on the "Mainstream setting" on a resolution of 1280x1080 (with an avg FPS of 50) but as soon as I turn the all settings to "Gamer" it suddenly takes AGES to turn the settings over and then takes frickin minutes to even load the level (Anti-Aliasing is off BTW) But then you can't even play the level as the FPS is unplayable with frames below 10.

Far Cry 2 on the other hand seems to work fine with 1680x1050 and Ultra High settings (with avg FPS of 40) except when I go to the main city Pala (i think it is called?) and to Mikes Bar. As soon as I am in those areas I get random frame slow downs to FPS's of 5 or 2 or even 0.

I did try COD4 online and off and it did work fine with avg FPS of 90 so I haven't a clue why those two games seem to have such a poo performance. Is it just me or do you guys think something dodgy is going on here?

What sort of performance does everybody else get with a 4870 on crysis and far cry 2?

I am using the 8.10 catalyst drivers, and I fully uninstalled my old card before putting in the 4870. The rest of my system you can see under "My System".

[Edit] Oh and I did a 3d Mark vantage test and got a GPU score of 8500 on it and 3d mark does say a HD4870 should get about 8450 so I mean it does get a good score in a test environment but i'm just not getting the real world scores. Will post my scores for bioshock and UT3 later [Edit]

[-iceblade^]

1. Diid you fully remove the nVidia drivers and then use Drivercleaner or something to clean them out whilst in safe mode before installing the catalyst drivers? if so, do so again.

2. note that the 4870 does not bench very well...

i had an 8800GT and i moved to a sapphire 4850, and i didn't find the performance gulf that great. I assume you're the same way

[matty-hodgson]

the performance drop when you enter Mike's bar will be because of the AA, yeah?
if you turn the AA off it should fix that.
it's the same on mine.. probably just because of all the objects with jagged edges..

[Guppy]

Well I just installed a far cry 2 hot fix for the 8.10 drivers and it now seems to work perfectly, got an avg FPS of 50 with no massive slow downs. So it seems crysis is the only downfall of this card. What sort of FPS have people been gettin with crysis warhead with a HD4870 and what settings do you use?

Thanks for all the help anyway guys.

[Webby]

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?...50aHVzaWFzdA==

Look here you should be seeing similar settings to them.

[Guppy]

Thanks Webby for the link, after trying their settings my system had a problem which i had earlier today (with spore tho), the game would freeze and then an assortment of coloured blocks would appear on my screen and i would have reset. Does this mean the graphics card is messed up?

Also while playing crysis warhead i was not getting the FPS that hardocp.com were getting, nowhere near it, it was up and down from 20 to 5 all the time.

I'm going to try it on a friends system later to see how it works on his.

[Guppy]

Well the card seemed to work a little better on my friends system. But i don't think that this card was worth the 170 quid i paid for it, especially since its only a small increase from the 8800gts i had. Think i'll go for a 9800gtx+. What's the consensus on these cards round here?

[Webby]

If you think you had a small increase moving from a 8800GTS to a HD4870 you will be even more disappointed if you get a 9800GTX+ as its performance is more on a par with a HD4850

On Tech Power Up their wide ranging benchmark suite sets on average (over all resolutions) the 4870 ~11% better performance than a 9800GTX+ and ~23% better than an 8800GT/9800GT 512MB, unfortunately no data for the GTS 512MB but assume its in the middle of the GT and the GTX you should be looking at a performance increase of ~17%, and that is probably estimated a bit low.

The differences are larger at the higher resolutions as well where games become more GPU bound. I think you may just need to up the resolution a bit remember higher resolution is almost always better for image quality even if you have to turn some things down to achieve it.

Oh and the blocks flashing up on the screen make it sound like a memory error, probably from overheating. Does it happen all the time? If so then send it back for a replacement.

[Guppy]

Yeah i think i was expecting too much of an increase in my over-zelaousness to buy a new card, my flat m8 brought me down to earth a bit about that. The block error has only happened twice, once yesterday morning while playing spore and then yesterday night while playing crysis. Hasn't happened since and i just played over an hour on TF2. If it happens again i'll defo be returning it.