[serverguy]

Totally stupid buying a 8800 now that the new ATI cards are out, perform better and are cheaper.

Get a 4850 or 4870 and you will have made a good choice.

[cheesepuff]

4870 is a joke. nearly 99% the same thing, the way its made, how its made, even the components AND the performance is only about 1% different. the price however is more like 20% different. the 4870 will give you so little improvement over the 4850 that the extra money to buy it is not worth it. get a 4850. and WoW will suck up ALL YOUR RAM!!! i dont play it, but i DO know that its the biggest RAM hog ever.

[serverguy]

Originally Posted by cheesepuff

4870 is a joke. nearly 99% the same thing, the way its made, how its made, even the components AND the performance is only about 1% different. the price however is more like 20% different. the 4870 will give you so little improvement over the 4850 that the extra money to buy it is not worth it. get a 4850.

Try doing your research before making unture comments in which you clearly haven't looked at any benchmarks. If you can afford it the extra is worth it.








http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3341&p=12

[cheesepuff]

In Crysis you only see a few more FPS, and in all those other games my Laptop can max out, so what im seeing here is that the 4870 is like i said. and yes, i have read more than 6 other independent benchmarks that what your showing. the 4870 is a rip of for the huge price gap for preformance when comparing to the 4850. and i bet you those people used a 512MB version of the 4850, not the 1GB version. the 1GB version cost less than the 4870 and will get better FPS on Crysis than the 512MB version. notice how they used a lower res on Crysis than the other games. All my resarch has led to me finding out the 4870 is more hype then upgrade from the 4850.

[Carbon]

The problem is not with the card, cheesepuff, it's with the state of the gaming industry.

There are no reliable benchmarks that are between excellently optimized games such as CoD4 and horribly optimized games such as Crysis. As a result, you tend to get either a ton of unneeded FPS or only a few FPS difference.

The 4870 is indeed a much more powerful card and benchmarks of future games will show this. Is it a "ripoff"? I wouldn't say that, but you certainly get less price/performance.

But think about it - is there any high end part that doesn't give you less? A E7200 to a E8400, for example, will be much less of a gap than a E2xxx to one. Most other video cards are the same way. The name of the game is diminishing returns and calling the 4870 out because of it is silly. Sure it may not give you as much of a boost, but that's expected or everyone would be buying it instead.

It used to be mid-highend stuff was the best, now we're solidly in midrange. P45/E7200/4850/2-4GB is recommended because it performs within such a small margin as someone with a E8500/E8600, a X48, and a 4870. If someone wants to set their budget higher a 4870 isn't bad, but of course it won't provide the same jump.

[serverguy]

I think Carbons pretty much said it all. Well explained.

You also mention about memory being more important, which is not strictly the case.

Unless you're gaming at a crazy resolution, then 1GB will make didly squit of difference to how the game plays on your PC.

I'd say the 4870 was a better choice than a 1GB 4850, and I think Carbon would agree with me, unless of course you game on a 42 inch TV.

[Carbon]

Yeah, I've said it before and I'll say it again - 1920x1200 is where you start _maybe_ needing 1GB and even that's questionable. I might grab a 1GB 4850 but that has nothing to do with running Crysis - it's a requirement as I run resource intensive level editors at the same time as games . It's similar to quad-core: a lot of people think it's SUPER EXCEPTIONAL XXXXTREME PERFORMANCE but if you open up Taskman (or in this case Rivatuner's VRAM plugin) you will see zero benefit unless you are a niche power user.

At the high res point I would recommend a 4870 or even a Crossfire setup anyway.

unless of course you game on a 42 inch TV.

I know you're joking, but remember, TVs tend to max out at 1080p. Size for TVs matters more than resolution because of how far you sit back. Only running at WQXGA (2560×1600) would 1GB be absolutely crucial, and the only way you'll get that is paying $500+ for a 30" monitor.

[serverguy]

Originally Posted by Carbon

I know you're joking, but remember, TVs tend to max out at 1080p. Size for TVs matters more than resolution because of how far you sit back. Only running at WQXGA (2560×1600) would 1GB be absolutely crucial, and the only way you'll get that is paying $500+ for a 30" monitor.

I thought that after I posted it actually

It was more getting my point across.

[cheesepuff]

The way i see it, hi end games such as Crysis recommend more than just 512MB of v ram, regardless of resolution. True, not many games are like this, but yet there are some, and will be more games that utilize such large amount of V ram. And from what i have seen, i see no need for a 4870, because i see no huge increase in FPS. now, it if was 4850 --> GTX280, then i see a huge difference. but to me there is not enough boost in performance to make the 4870 desirable over the 4850. Its like when there was the 8800GTX and then the 8800 Ultra came out. no huge difference in performance there either. And to share more of my point of view, this is the monitor i plan to get with my next build http://www.provantage.com/doublesight-ds-305w~4DBLE00M.htm

i have never seen a monitor of this res at a price of $500. more like $780+

[Carbon]

We're talking the majority of users, not a niche: hardly anyone has 30" monitors. In fact, 73% of users are still running traditional 4:3 CRT setups according to the Steam hardware survey. 32% of users are still at 1024x768, another 39% at 1280 x 960, and only a tiny 2.29% at 1920 x 1200, the cutoff boundary for that amount of VRAM. Users who report "other", including both higher and substandard resolutions, are 1.39%. To put it another way, out of 1,777,034 respondants, 24,700 possibly had that resolution.

The 4850 uses GDDR3, the 4870 uses GDDR5. That gives it a huge speed increase - enough to give a theoretically and experimentally massive boost at higher resolutions. Not only is it an extra 5GT/s or so for texture fill rate, theoretical bandwidth is effectively doubled from 63.5 to 115.2.

Any only trivial boost you are seeing has nothing to do with performance, it has to do with the game. Crysis may not play well but remember that the 8800GT and 4850 also perform quite similarly in benchmarks at the same resolution. It should not ever be used as a reliable benchmark because it smashes the pack together into one huge mass, testing at 30-40FPS.