Testbed and Methods

To study the theoretical potential of the new ATI Radeon HD 4850 and to compare it against previous generation ATI and Nvidia graphics accelerators we assembled the following testbeds:

• Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 CPU (3.0GHz, 1333MHz x 9 FSB)
• DFI LANParty UT ICFX3200-T2R/G mainboard (ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200 chipset) for ATI Radeon HD graphics cards
• Asus P5N32-E SLI mainboard (Nvidia nForce 680i SLI chipset) for Nvidia GeForce graphics cards
• Corsair TWIN2X2048-8500C5 memory (2x1GB, 1066MHz, 5-5-5-15, 2T)
• Maxtor MaXLine III 7B250S0 HDD (250GB, SATA-150, 16MB buffer)
• Enermax Galaxy DXX EGX1000EWL PSU (1000W)
• Dell 3007WFP monitor (30”, 2560x1600@60Hz maximum resolution)
• Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit
• Nvidia GeForce 175.19 WHQL for GeForce 9
• ATI Catalyst 8.5/8.6 for ATI Radeon HD 3000
• ATI Catalyst beta for Radeon HD 4000 (sample_vista32-64_HD_4800_Series_5.exe)

According to our testing methodology, the drivers were set up to provide the highest possible quality of texture filtering and to minimize the effect of software optimizations used by default by both: AMD/ATI and Nvidia. Also we enabled transparent texture filtering. As a result, our ATI and Nvidia driver settings looked as follows:

ATI Catalyst:

• Catalyst A.I.: Standard
• Mipmap Detail Level: High Quality
• High Quality AF: On
• Wait for vertical refresh: Always Off
• Enable Adaptive Anti-Aliasing: On/Quality
• Method: Multi-sampling
• Temporal Anti-Aliasing: Off
• Other settings: default

Nvidia GeForce:

• Texture filtering – Quality: High quality
• Texture filtering – Trilinear optimization: Off
• Texture filtering – Anisotropic sample optimization: Off
• Vertical sync: Force off
• Antialiasing - Gamma correction: On
• Antialiasing - Transparency: Multisampling
• Other settings: default

To study the theoretical performance of our today’s testing participants we used the following applications:

• Marko Dolenc’s Fillrate and Pixel Shader Tester
• Xbitmark version 0.65
• Theoretical benchmarks from Futuremark 3DMark06 suite
• Theoretical benchmarks from Futuremark 3DMark Vantage suite