Sapphire HD4850 512MB Video Card
Posted on: 12.11.2008 01:00:00

Installation

The card installed just like any other card would and I had no problems fitting it into an average mid-tower case.

The regular readers will have probably noticed that this picture is of our IP35P test rig, which has since been upgraded to an IP45, DDR3 based test rig. Rest assured that the new test rig was used in all benchmarks, so the card was given as much chance to shine as possible. This picture was used to show that the card has no problems fitting in medium/smaller cases.

Once the drivers were installed, the card was recognised correctly without a problem and all was good to go.

Here are the cards features as reported by GPUz.

Testing and Results

Frames per second were recorded using the games built in benchmark (where available) or from a period of playing the game while recording the fps with fraps. The catalyst version used was 8.9. All results are an average of three or more runs.

On Review: Sapphire ATI Radeon HD4850

Results It’s times like this that I love being a reviewer, getting to play through some really fun and pretty games while ‘working’ is a really cool thing to be able to do!

The first benchmark up on the card was the DX10 version of ‘The of Call of Juarez’. This was run at 1680*1050 with all settings maxxed out.

The DX10 patch for this game really improves the visuals, so if you have this game in DX9, it’s well worth getting the patch to upgrade to DX10. It does however sacrifice some performance (fps) for the visual improvement, but I think it is justified.

The card was able to sustain an average framerate of 31fps. This is very playable especially considering the graphical settings. The minimum recorded fps during the timedemo was 14fps which is just verging on stuttering, but turing down a couple of settings with this game will bring those numbers up and make the game more than playable.

Next to be benchmarked was ‘The Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare’. This game doesn’t have a built in benchmark so fraps was used to record the framerate while playing the first level. The game was played at 1680*1050 with all graphical options maxxed out and 4xMSAA enabled.

The 4850 was able to sustain an average framerate of 81fps in this game, which is more than you need to make the game silky smooth. Even the minimum framerate is high at 44fps.

Next up to try and stress the card is Racedriver GRID. This is currently my favourite game and if you haven’t tried it, I recommend you download the demo. This was again set at 1680*1050 with all the options maxxed out and 4xAA enabled.

With GRID the 4850 shines, and the average framerate stays well above the silky smooth 60fps mark and is as high as 76fps, even the minimum is around 60fps. Again, this is great performance from the 4850.

Next we are taking a look at the Crysis benchmark; this cripples most cards, so let’s see how it does on the 4850. It was run at 1680*1050, with all graphical settings on high.

Crysis is a killer when it comes to graphics cards, and the 4850 is spared little mercy. The average framerate is above the 30fps playable mark though and this is with all the eye candy turned up to high. The minimum framerate is rather low and in intense parts of the game you may find that it gets a little choppy.

Lastly we have Futuremark’s 3DMark06 and 3DMark Vantage results.

We have a very respectable 3DMark06 Score of 11793 points and a vantage Performance score of 6629 points.

Now that we have seen what this card is capable of, let’s wrap it up in the conclusion.

Next Page – Conclusion

---