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.
3DMark doesn’t need to be explained to most anyone, because if you’ve been benchmarking or PC gaming for a while, you have no doubt heard of Futuremark and their tools. Vantage is the newest of the bunch, and its tests are as hardcore as they come. The benchmark properly stresses a GPU, and spits out an overall score for you to munch on.
The overall use of these scores is constantly debated, because real gameplay matters far more than canned benchmarks. However, they are still fun to use for the sake of competition. In no way should they be the sole factor of your GPU purchasing decision, however.
Hmm. As we saw on the previous page with ET: QW, the HD 4850 proved superior. This was not the theme throughout the entire review, however. Here again we see the same thing with our Vantage results. It seems this card can keep right up to NVIDIA’s 9800 GTX in real-world gameplay, but excels in timedemos and canned benchmarks.
I can’t verify right now that this is always going to be the case, but I plan to do some tests to make sure that all results are constant and accurate. But as it stands right now, it does seem that the HD 4850 showcases better performance in timedemo-type benchmarks than it does in real-world testing.