+Radeon 4850s VS 9800 GTX

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The reference design 4850 is a single slot graphics card which uses a 55 nanometer RV770 GPU. The RV770 contains 965 million transistors, 800 stream processors, 40 texture units and 16 ROPs, a significant increase over the 3870 which featured 320 stream processors and 16 texture units.

On the 4850 all of this is connected to 512mb of GDDR3 memory (Quimonda) by a 256 Bit bus and like the previous generation the new product supports DirectX 10.1 and Shader Model 4.1 as well as PCI-Express 2.0.

Avivo HD is also supported and as well as the acceleration of Blu-Ray movies ATI have enhanced the specification further to include dynamic contrast enhancement and output support for 7.1 audio and xvYCC colour space.

Finally the power requirement of the 4850 is around 110 watts.

Nvidia’s 9800 GTX+ is basically a slightly redesigned version of the original 9800 GTX. The G92 core is still used (it has been transferred to a 55nm process) and the overall design from cooler to PCB is near identical. There are no changes in core configuration which means 128 Unified Shaders, 16 ROPs and a 256 Bit bus connected to Hynix GDDR3.

Where things do get a little different is in the core, shader and memory clockspeeds of the card. The reference 9800 GTX was clocked at 675MHz, 1688MHz and 1100MHz with various models reaching a little higher. The reference GTX+ actually starts in the same area as the highest overclocked GTX models with speeds of 740MHz Core, 1836MHz Shader and 1100MHz memory. Despite the higher speeds of the GTX+ the new process actually allows for a lower power requirement of approximately 155 watts.

When we look further than the clock speeds we find little else different with DirectX 10 and Shader Model 4.0 support both included as is PCI-Express 2.0 and PureVideo HD.

NOTE: With the release of the GTX+ Nvidia have made available drivers which enable PhysX support on some of their GPUs. The GTX+ is one such model and while the original version of the GTX supports this functionality, this is the first time we will have been able to test it.

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PhysX

Test System

- 9800 GTX +

- MSI 4850

- Visiontek 4850

- 9800 GTX OC

- 9800 GX2

- Geforce 260 Reference

- Zotac Geforce GTX 280 AMP! Edition

- Samsung SyncMaster 305T

- Zotac Nforce 790i Motherboard

- Asus P5E3 Deluxe Motherboard

- Intel QX99770 (3.2Ghz – 1600fsb)

- 2x2Gb Corsair DDR3-1800Mhz 7-7-7-20

- Akasa 1000w PSU

- Benq 16x DVD Writer

- LG GBW-H10N Blu-Ray Writer

- Xbox 360 HD-DVD Drive

- Belkin Wireless-G PCI card

- 3x WD Raptor Hard Drives (OS/Games on RAID 0 Drives)

- 1x Hitachi Deskstar

- Arctic Cooling MX-2 Paste

- Arctic Cooling Freezer/ Coolit Freezone Elite

- Windows Vista Ultimate 64Bit + SP1

- Forceware Release 177.39

- Catalyst 8.6

- DirectX 9.0c/DirectX 10

- Call Of Duty 4 (DX9)

- Grid (DX9)

- Assassins Creed (DX10)

- Tiger Woods 08 (DX9)

- Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 (DX9)

- Lost Planet Colonies (DX10)

- Half-Life 2: Ep2 (DX9)

- World In Conflict (DX10)

- Crysis (DX10)

- Oblivion (DX9)

- PowerDVD 8.0

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Call of Duty 4

RaceDriver GRID

World In Conflict

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Tiger Woods 08

Rainbow Six Vegas 2

Lost Planet - Colonies

Half-Life 2: Episode 2

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Crysis

Oblivion

Assassin's Creed

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