by Rob Williams on June 25, 2008 in Graphics & Displays
Proper competition from AMD in the mid-range scheme of things might have taken a while to happen, but it does happen with the HD 4000 series. We are taking a look at the smaller of the two new models, which offers exceptional performance for the price of $200.
Each graph for our benchmarking results are labeled with the resolution that the game was played at, while omitting secondary settings such as Anti-Aliasing, Anisotropic Filtering, texture quality, et cetera. To view all specific settings that we used, please refer to our testing methodology page, where screenshots show the exact settings used.
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
The last game we will be using in our benchmarks is ET: Quake Wars. This is also the only game in our testing that’s executed as a time demo, as opposed to the manual play through like the rest of our games. The reason for this is twofold.
The first reason is that we like to include at least one time demo, despite its CPU-boundedness, in order to see how our cards scale when run in such a situation. The second is the fact that this game caps its FPS at 60, except during time demos.
Our time demo takes place in the Area 22 level, with the main goal to destroy the jamming generator. The actual play through took around five minutes, but the time demo goes far quicker, as is the case with most time demos.
Settings: Maxed settings are used here for the most part. Our 1680 resolution uses 2x AA while 1920 and 2560 use 4x.
I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again… the results here struck me as odd. In all of our other tests, the HD 4850 either sat right behind the 9800 GTX, or came inches ahead. Here, the card flies past the rest, minus the dual-GPU card in our 2560×1600 run.
It’s a little strange. The only test where the HD 4850 truly shines is with our lone timedemo. Luckily, our 3DMark Vantage tests are up next, and since they are of a timedemo nature as well, we can see if similar results are to be had.