by Rob Williams on January 7, 2009 in Graphics & Displays
If you game at ultra-high resolutions and want to know where the best bang for the buck can be found in graphics cards, look no further than Sapphire’s dual-GPU HD 4850 X2. At $300, it’s priced-right and offers incredible performance regardless of whether you prefer high anti-aliasing settings or resolutions.
As odd as it may seem, every single game we currently use for our graphic card benchmarking is a sequel or an entry in a series of games, including this one. The original Unreal Tournament launched in late 1999, and since then, it has become a stature with GPU benchmarking. Similar to Call of Duty, the UT series of games is one that manages to deliver spectacular graphics, but doesn’t require a bleeding-edge machine to see them.
UTIII offers a variety of modes and levels, and has some of the most interesting and lush environments ever seen in a video game. If I could choose where I wanted to die, it would most likely be in the Gateway level, which you can see in the screenshot below. This level is one of the most interesting in the game as it’s essentially three levels in one, linked together with portals – and it’s hard to beat the feeling of scoring a portal frag.
The game might be one of the best-looking currently on the PC, but it doesn’t offer robust in-game settings like some others in our suite. Because of this, we are forced to enable anti-aliasing in the control panel of the current graphics card. Both ATI’s and NVIDIA’s drivers allow us to choose 4xAA, so that’s what we stick with throughout all of our testing.
Once again, the HD 4850 X2 performs exceptionally, and in this particular case, it performs very closely to the HD 4870 X2, thanks in part to ATI’s latest drivers.
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Palit GTX 280 1GB
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2560×1600, Max Detail, 4xAA
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72.148 FPS
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Palit HD 4870 X2 2GB
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2560×1600, Max Detail, 4xAA
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55.479 FPS
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Sapphire HD 4850 X2 2GB
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2560×1600, Max Detail, 4xAA
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53.366 FPS
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Palit 9800 GX2 1GB
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2560×1600, Max Detail, 0xAA
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78.909 FPS
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Palit HD 4870 512MB Sonic
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2560×1600, Max Detail, 0xAA
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60.901 FPS
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Palit HD 4870 512MB
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2560×1600, Max Detail, 0xAA
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57.617 FPS
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ASUS 9800 GTX 512MB
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2560×1600, Max Detail, 0xAA
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48.874 FPS
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Gigabyte 9600 GT 512MB
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2560×1600, Max Detail, 0xAA
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43.781 FPS
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ASUS HD 4850 512MB
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2560×1600, Max Detail, 0xAA
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42.228 FPS
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NVIDIA’s GTX 280 took the crown quite easily here, but our top three all offered good performance and they were the only three to allow the game to be played at max resolution with anti-aliasing while retaining smooth gameplay.