by Rob Williams on October 7, 2008 in Graphics & Displays
It’s no secret that the HD 4870 is one of the best overall GPUs on the market right now, but with so much selection from vendors, it’s hard to choose the “best” one. Palit has a definite winner with their Sonic Dual Edition though. It’s pre-overclocked, runs 20°C cooler than the reference design and carries no cost premium.
Crysis Warhead might have the ability to bring any system to its knees even with what we consider to be reasonable settings, but Call of Duty 4 manages to look great regardless of your hardware, as long as it’s reasonably current. It’s also one of the few games on the market that will actually benefit from having a multi-core processor, although Quad-Cores offer no performance gain over a Dual-Core of the same frequency.
For our testing, we use a level called The Bog. The reason is simple… it looks great, plays well and happens to be incredibly demanding on the system. It takes place at night, but there is more gunfire, explosions, smoke, specular lighting and flying corpses than you can shake an assault rifle at.
Because the game runs well on all current mid-range GPUs at reasonable graphic settings, we max out what’s available to us, which includes enabling 4xAA and 8xAF, along with choosing the highest available options for everything else.
Once again, Palit’s Sonic card outpaced the stock-clocked model with ease, although unlike Crysis, the differences here actually reach 5 FPS at certain resolutions. For the price, both of the HD 4870’s deliver fantastic frame rates.
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Palit HD 4870 X2 2GB
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2560×1600, Max Detail, 8xAA
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113.024 FPS
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Palit GTX 280 1GB
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2560×1600, Max Detail, 8xAA
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85.440 FPS
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Palit 9800 GX2 1GB
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2560×1600, Max Detail, 4xAA
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76.192 FPS
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Palit HD 4870 512MB Sonic
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2560×1600, Max Detail, 4xAA
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67.928 FPS
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Palit HD 4870 512MB
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2560×1600, Max Detail, 4xAA
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64.825 FPS
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ASUS 9800 GTX 512MB
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2560×1600, Max Detail, 0xAA
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70.363 FPS
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ASUS HD 4850 512MB
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2560×1600, Max Detail, 0xAA
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69.745 FPS
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Gigabyte 9600 GT 512MB
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2560×1600, Max Detail, 0xAA
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48.180 FPS
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The setting we found to be most playable is the same one used in our 2560×1600 test. Even with the in-game settings maxed out, the card delivers close to 70 FPS, which is more than enough to offer the gameplay experience we’re all looking for.