
- #HOW MANY PORTS ON A ATI RADEON HD 4250 CARD FULL#
- #HOW MANY PORTS ON A ATI RADEON HD 4250 CARD SERIES#
You can run both of these titles absolutely maxed out in terms of quality settings at any resolution you like and still enjoy smooth, stutter-free gaming. 48 frames per second at 2,560 x 1,600 with 4x anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering is a great result. Likewise, the 4850 makes utter mincemeat of Half-Life 2. The 8800 GTS 512MB manages just 24 frames per second at the same settings. That is seriously impressive for a sub-£150 video card. At really high resolution settings such as 2,560 x 1,600 in Call Of Duty, for instance, the 4850 cranks out a reasonably smooth 32 frames per second average. In both Call Of Duty 4 and Half-Life 2, the 4850 gives the GeForce board a pretty good pasting.

Our triple whammy of game tests takes in an old favourite, Half-Life 2, one of the most popular recent shooters, Call Of Duty 4, and the GPU-killer that is Crysis. With that in mind we've lined up the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB, a card that typically sells for slightly more than £130 right now but should be available shortly for about the same money as the 4850. It's actually quite tricky to choose a direct competitor, since the arrival of the 4800 will inevitably push prices of existing graphics chipsets from NVIDIA down.
#HOW MANY PORTS ON A ATI RADEON HD 4250 CARD SERIES#
Our first hands-on with the 4800 Series takes the form of the cheaper 4850 board. However, some board makers will release larger 1GB cards shortly after launch – for a price, of course. Both cards are equipped as standard with 512MB of graphics memory. US prices for the two boards are $199 and $299. The top chip will be the 4870 with core and memory clockspeeds of 750MHz and 3.6GHz respectively and should squeak in under £200. The 4850 clocks in at 625MHz core and 2GHz memory and we reckon will sell for a startlingly low price of around £130. With a suitable motherboard, you can combine up to four 4800 boards for what will theoretically be the most powerful real-time rendering rig in the consumer market.īut what about the most important metric of any GPU's success, performance? At launch there are two Radeon HD 4800 models. Needless to say, the 4800 series supports AMD's Crossfire multi-GPU technology. In practice it was just plain slow.įor the record, AMD has also retained and improved adaptive AA for the 4800 series, so now you can have the best of both worlds. With the launch of the Radeon HD 2900 series early in 2007, AMD introduced a new programmable or 'adaptive' approach to smoothing the jagged edges of rendered objects. It's also a relief to note that AMD has reintroduced a conventional box-filter algorithm for anti-aliasing. At just 256 bits, it is half the width of the beastly GeForce GTX 280. That's handy because the one area where the 4800 looks a little deficient is the width of its memory bus. With a data rate of 3.6GHz, the new GDDR5 chips are not far off twice as fast as the best previous graphics memory. AMD reckons the maximum power consumption of the 4800 Series is 160 watts while the GTX 280 sucks up an enormous 236 watts.įurther highlights of the 4800 series include the introduction of a new graphics memory type for the 4870 model. So, not only is the 4800 smaller and cheaper to make. But the GeForce GTX 280 requires no less than 1.4 billion transistors in return for 0.933TFlops of processing power. Now, that might sound like a lot of transistors.

#HOW MANY PORTS ON A ATI RADEON HD 4250 CARD FULL#
The fastest of the new Radeon HD 4800 boards, the 4870 (see below for full specifications), is capable of a colossal 1.2TFlops of raw compute power courtesy of 956 million transistors. It's also rather revealing to compare the 4800's raw computer power with that of NVIDIA's new mega-GPU, the GeForce GTX 280. Despite the 150 per cent increase in shader and texture units, the 4800 Series has just 44% more transistors. To appreciate just how compact it is, try this for size. The result, is an extremely compact and cost-effective graphics chip. But what AMD has done is so much more sophisticated than create an oversized 3800 core.Įvery aspect of the chip has been overhauled and redesigned with an eye to both efficiency and performance. It's even based on precisely the same 55nm silicon production technology. This new pixel pounder may offer much the same DirectX 10.1 3D feature set as ye olde Radeon HD 3800. Factor in core clockspeeds that are approximately on a par with the 3800 Series and the result is monumental boost in raw processing power.īut don't get the idea that AMD has merely blown a massive transistor budget to simply cut 'n' paste more functionals units into the GPU core. The 4800's texture-processing capabilities have also ballooned from 16 to 40 units.
