News - ATI Radeon HD 4830 set to outmuscle GeForce 9800 GT

[HEXUS]

Mooted to be launched next month for around £89, the 4830 should give NVIDIA's 9800 GT a good fight.

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[Nelviticus]

Tee hee hee, it's funny how the market turns around isn't it? I had only ever used nVidia cards and assumed that ATI would never be top of the tree again, but they bought out the 4850 just when I was looking to spend £100 on a graphics card. For the money it's amazing - if I'd been ready to buy a week earlier I'd have ended up with a significantly inferior nVidia card.

I like ATI's straightforward naming system as well. Hopefully nVidia will sort their act out and start being sensible with naming and pricing again.

[pow1983]

I am surprised by this claim when I have 2 ATI 4850's in crossfire mode and the performance of Battlefield 1942 is worse than my nVidia 7300. Yes BF 1942 a 2002 game!!!! Not only does it play bad it looks noticably worse compared to the 7300 on the highest settings.

Crysis is unplayable at any resolution or graphical setting I choose with the 4850's (i've not bothered to test it on my 7300). However, whats interesting is that the performance is no different from the highest settings to the lowest settings.

I just cant see how this claim can be true!!!!

[Hicks12]

Crossfire doesnt scale well or at all in crysis so you will be struggling to compare against the 4870 etc, i dont know why its unplayable because i used to get a pretty solid 25-35 with high settings and 1680x1050 resolution on an 8800GTS 512mb, perhaps drivers are old or something?

[pow1983]

perhaps drivers are old or something?

The only drivers to have been installed on the system are the Catalyst 8.9. It doesnt have any hang overs from older drivers.

If the 4830 is set to be as good as the 9800GT, that must mean the 4850 should be better than the 9800GT. I have another computer with a 8800GT and I can tell you that the 4850 is miles behind in performance, at least Crysis runs on the 8800GT at a Widescreen resolution. Therefore I fail to believe the 4830 is going to be anywhere near a reasonable 8x series nVidia let alone a 9800GT!

[Lanky123]

Crysis is unplayable at any resolution or graphical setting I choose with the 4850's (i've not bothered to test it on my 7300). However, whats interesting is that the performance is no different from the highest settings to the lowest settings.

Many reviews show that the HD4850 beats the 8800gt, even in Crysis which plays better on Nvidia cards. An example:

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/MSI/HD_4850/8.html

The fact that your performance doesn't drop with higher settings suggests you may be CPU limited. I think it's more likely to be buggy crossfire drivers though - have you tried playing it with just one of your HD4850s?

Back on topic does anyone have any ideas what the stock cooler will be like? I hope it's decent, noise and temps is one thing Nvidia still seems to do better than ATI.

[pow1983]

Many reviews show that the HD4850 beats the 8800gt, even in Crysis which plays better on Nvidia cards. An example:

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/MSI/HD_4850/8.html

The fact that your performance doesn't drop with higher settings suggests you may be CPU limited. I think it's more likely to be buggy crossfire drivers though - have you tried playing it with just one of your HD4850s?

Cheers. I'll play about some more and remove one card to see what happens.
I will start a post on ATi's forum.

[Nelviticus]

I previously had a 7600GT and then a 7900GT, either of which would completely blow away a 7300. My 4850 blows away my 7900GT - Crysis was a slideshow on the 7900 and runs like a dream on the 4850, so if you're getting worse performance in any game then something is horribly, horribly wrong. Could be drivers, could be a faulty card.

[shaffaaf27]

actually this happened to me with my 4850, ran worse than my 2900GT what ever i did, even RMAed the 4850.

turns out, it partially killed the x16 PCIE 1.1 P35 P5K-E slot, so i RMAed that, and now its fine. dont know why but it did, might be a PCIE 2.0 into a 1.1 slot thing?

[itdoesntmatter]

ATI out to draw attention away from the big boys.

With Christmas on its way we should be getting some great deals on graphics cards but I am surprised ATI is releasing so many models.
Ok they are obvious but there are still a fair amount of them with the old platforms still aboot.

[Cichlidash]

Nividia had better start bringing something to the table soon, else they are in for a very harsh Xmas period. Not that they have bad cards but it seems that Ati are cornering the market a lot with the four thousand series.

Still the 260 and 280 are very good cards but struggle on the price point, with more cut back on prices the still have the hardware to contend and even beat Ati, but I for one would not pay more for a 260 than a 4870.

[shaithis]

Always funny to read a thread like this.

Its not doom and gloom for anyone, the balance of power shifts all the time over the years.

nVidia were the kings after 3dfx went under, then ATI took over for a while, then nVidia took it back and now ATI/AMD have it back (however marginally).

ATI/AMD have far from "cornered the market", what they have done is finally get a slice of the pie back.

nVidia will not be running around like headless chickens thinking they are doomed to failure and panicking over xmas sales.

[this_is_gav]

but I am surprised ATI is releasing so many models.

It's probably just silicon that wasn't quite good enough for HD4850s, so they're releasing it in a slightly inferior model. Good news for us. Most of the power of the HD4830 for even less. Whether it's worth that, we'll see with the actual prices, but it shifts cores which were otherwise going to be binned, so it's probably worth it in the bigger picture.