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  Palit HD 4850

  Roydon Cerejo, Jul 04, 2008 1641 hrs IST

  ATI is back with a bang, and its about time.

  Superb performance, slim profile, Value for money

  Heats up a lot, poor overclocker

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Page 1 - Specification Page 2 - Bundle Page 3 - The Card Page 4 - Test setup and 3D Mark, Vantage Page 5 - FEAR Page 6 - Half-Life 2 Page 7 - Quake 4 Page 8 - CRYSIS Page 9 - Call of Juarez Page 10 - Overclocking and Conclusion

It's been a really long time since we've seen anything new from ATI that would make us jump out of our seats and take notice. With NVIDIA spitting out new cards like nobody's business, ATI has remained quiet all this while. The first of the HD series from ATI, the HD 2900XT looked really good on paper having 320 shader units and a 512-bit memory bus. This was better than the top '8' series from NVIDIA. But when it came to real world performance it just couldn't keep up with the 8800GTX. It couldn't overtake the '8' series in the game tests but it did overtake it in the amount of power consumed.

The next release was the HD 38xx series. It had the same amount of shader units but the memory bandwidth was cut into half (from 512-bit to 256-bit) but at the same time they were using GDDR4 memory, which worked at an impressive 2.25GHz. The cards were more than decent but couldn't keep up with the NVIDIA 8800GT, the performance card for budget conscious users. Given ATI's shaky drivers, this round once again went in NVIDIA's favour. It seemed like ATI just couldn't catch up. But now, times seem to have changed and the dark clouds are starting to clear. We have the much-hyped Radeon HD 4850 in our labs today. Even though this card isn't officially launched here (that will happen next week) we managed to get our hands on an evaluation sample. This card is touted to take on the 9800GTX, which is currently the fastest card under the 20K range. Let's see if ATI can break the jinx they have been under for a long time.

Specifications

The first striking difference is the new core based on the RV770 chipset. This new chip packs in a whopping 800 shader units compared to the 240 on the GTX 280. Of course NVIDIA and ATI both have completely different architectures so you can't really compare them.
Here's a list of some of the new improvements ATI has been working on:

TeraScale Graphics Engine - the new graphics engine is capable of over one teraFLOPS and nearly one billion transistors. That's some serious processing power that will come handy for high resolutions.

Advanced GDDR5 Memory - While NVIDIA is still stuck on GDDR3, ATI has gone GDDR4 and now GDDR5. This provides twice the bandwidth per pin of GDDR3. It can be found on the HD4870; the 4850 ships with DDR3.

Unified Video Decoder 2(UVD 2) -This helps offload the task of streaming and rendering HD content from the CPU. The latest iterations also lets you take full advantage of Blu-Ray functionality with dual stream processing and PIP capabilities.

Some of the other features include DirectX 10.1 support, CrossFireX technology, Accelerated Video Transcoding, enhanced DVD upscaling.


The Box

The card came in the shaped box as all of Palit's cards come in, except in red attire. The front is dominated by 'Frobot' with a '4850' sticker on the left mentioning the specs of the card. On the right we have the logos of the technology the card supports. The back as always is the specs of the card in many languages.

Page 1 - Specification Page 2 - Bundle Page 3 - The Card Page 4 - Test setup and 3D Mark, Vantage Page 5 - FEAR Page 6 - Half-Life 2 Page 7 - Quake 4 Page 8 - CRYSIS Page 9 - Call of Juarez Page 10 - Overclocking and Conclusion

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