x1900xt -> 4850

[VirusType2]

Thinking about upgrading to a 4850 1GB for about $100.

This is the video card I have - Sapphire (DX9 512MB PCIe 16x 1.0):

* 384 million transistors on 90nm
* fabrication process
* Up to 48 pixel shader processors
* 8 vertex shader processors
* 256-bit 8-channel GDDR3
* memory interface
* Native PCI Express x16 bus interface

Ring Bus Memory Controller

* Up to 512-bit internal ring bus for memory reads
* Fully associative texture, color, and Z/stencil cache designs
* Hierarchical Z-buffer with Early Z test
* Lossless Z Compression (up to 48:1)
* Fast Z-Buffer Clear
* Optimized for performance at high display resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions

Ultra-Threaded Shader Engine

* Support for Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 programmable vertex and pixel shaders in hardware
* Full speed 128-bit floating point processing for all shader operations
* Up to 512 simultaneous pixel threads
* Dedicated branch execution units for high performance dynamic branching and flow control
* Dedicated texture address units for improved efficiency
* 3Dc+ texture compression o High quality 4:1 compression for normal maps and two-channel data formats
* High quality 2:1 compression for luminance maps and single-channel data formats
* Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL® 2.0

Advanced Image Quality Features

* 64-bit floating point HDR rendering supported throughout the pipeline
o Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing
* 32-bit integer HDR (10:10:10:2) format supported throughout the pipeline
o Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing
* 2x/4x/6x Anti-Aliasing modes
o Multi-sample algorithm with gamma correction, programmable sparse sample patterns, and centroid sampling
o New Adaptive Anti-Aliasing feature with Performance and Quality modes
o Temporal Anti-Aliasing mode
o Lossless Color Compression (up to 6:1) at all resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions
* 2x/4x/8x/16x Anisotropic Filtering modes
o Up to 128-tap texture filtering
o Adaptive algorithm with Performance and Quality options

* High resolution texture support (up to 4k x 4k)

This is the exact model I'm looking at.

Graphics Engine RADEON HD4850
Video Memory 1GB GDDR3
Engine Clock 625 MHz
Memory Clock 950MHz x 2
Memory Interface 256bit
DirectX Support 10.1
Bus Standard PCIE 2.0

* 956 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
* PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
* 256-bit GDDR3
* MicrosoftR DirectXR 10.1 support
o ShaderModel 4.1
o 32-bit floating point texture filtering
o Indexed cube map arrays
o Independent blend modes per render target
o Pixel coverage sample masking
o Read/write multi-sample surfaces with shaders
o Gather4 texture fetching
* Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
o 800 stream processing units
+ Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
+ Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
+ Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
* 128-bit floating point precision for all operations
o Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
o Shader instruction and constant caches
o Up to 160 texture fetches per clock cycle
o Up to 128 textures per pixel
o Fully associative multi-level texture cache design
o DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
o High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
o Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs
o Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
o Early Z test, Re-Z, Z Range optimization, and Fast Z Clear
o Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)
o Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)
o 8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing support
o Accelerated physics processing
* Dynamic Geometry Acceleration
o High performance vertex cache
o Programmable tessellation unit
o Accelerated geometry shaderpath for geometry amplification
o Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance
* Anti-aliasing features
o Multi-sample anti-aliasing (2, 4, or 8 samples per pixel)
o Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality
o Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
o Gamma correct
o Super AA (ATI CrossFireXTMconfigurations only)
o All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR renderin
* Texture filtering features
o 2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)
o 128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
o sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
o Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
o Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support
o Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support
* OpenGL 2.0 support
* ATI AvivoTM HD Video and Display Platform6
o Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD 2) for H.264/AVC, VC-1, and MPEG-2 video formats
+ High definition (HD) playback of Blu-ray and HD DVD video
+ Dual stream (HD+SD) playback support
+ DirectX Video Acceleration 1.0 & 2.0 support
+ Support for BD-Live certified applications
o Hardware DivXand MPEG-1 video decode acceleration
o Accelerated video transcoding& encoding for H.264 and MPEG-2 formats
o AIT AvivoVideo Post Processor6
+ Color space conversion
+ Chroma subsampling format conversion
+ Horizontal and vertical scaling
+ Gamma correction
+ Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
+ De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
+ Detail enhancement
+ Color vibrance and flesh tone correction
+ Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
+ Bad edit correction
+ Enhanced DVD upscaling (SD to HD)
+ Automatic dynamic contrast adjustment
o Two independent display controllers
+ Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays for each display
+ Full 30-bit display processing
+ Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion
+ Spatial/temporal dithering provides 30-bit color quality on 24-bit and 18-bit displays
+ High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all display outputs
+ Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
+ Fast, glitch-free mode switching
+ Hardware cursor
o One integrated dual-link DVI display outputs
+ Each supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600 (dual-link DVI)2
+ Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content3
o Two integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
+ Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x15362
o HDMI output support
+ All display resolutions up to 1920x10802
+ Integrated HD audio controller with support for stereo and multi-channel (up to 7.1) audio formats, including AC-3, AAC, DTS, DTS-HD & Dolby True- HD4, enabling a plug-and-play audio solution over HDMI
o Integrated AMD XilleonTM HDTV encoder
+ Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
+ Underscan and overscan compensation
o Seamless integration of pixel shaderswith video in real time
o VGA mode support on all display outputs
* ATI PowerPlayTM Technology5
o Advanced power management technology for optimal performance and power savings
o Performance-on-Demand
+ Constantly monitors GPU activity, dynamically adjusting clocks and voltage based on user scenario
+ Clock and memory speed throttling
+ Voltage switching
+ Dynamic clock gating
+ Central thermal management-on-chip sensor monitors GPU temperature and triggers thermal actions as required

POWERCOLOR AX4850 1GBD3-PH Radeon HD 4850 1GB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card - Retail

DX 10.1

I can't find a direct comparison between the two cards.

For what it's worth the Windows 7 Experience Index of my x1900xt is 5.9. From customer reviews of the exact 4850 I'm looking at, one reviewer says the Windows 7 Experience Index is 6.9. So the difference of 1 point there.

Also, what do you think about 'open box' video cards. I could save 20%.

Do you think it's worth it to upgrade or should I wait? I do plan to get a better card later, I was actually considering the 5970 or whatever so it could be a long time before that card is in the $240 range.

 

[Quixoticism]

What's your proc? And yes I'd go for that upgrade.

The 1900XT is a little slower than the 4670.

 

[VirusType2]

i5-750

I found the cards exact specifications, so I updated the specs in the first post.

 

[Quixoticism]

4850 will be a nice upgrade, but if you're planning on it just get the better card.

 

[VirusType2]

4850 will be a nice upgrade, but if you're planning on it just get the better card.

Pretty much the same conclusion I came to.

Fact is, the card I want won't be in my budget for a few years. Meanwhile, the 4850 is under $100 and could give me about 40% performance increase - (from what I hear) which I could really use.

As it is, I have to cut back on graphics options because I'm not getting the framerates I'd like. For example in DiRT, it's playable in full spec, but with a hack that removes HDR, the game is much more enjoyable to play, but it looks pretty bland.

 

[Warbie]

I'm using a 4850 at the mo and find it maxes Source games without difficulty, but does struggle with newer engines. If you want to play Bad Company 2 at ~ 60fps and a decent res you'll have to drop to low settings, for example.

 

[Krynn72]

I play BC2 on my 4850 on all high settings except with AA on 2x and HBAO off, at 1920x1200 and get ~45fps usually. Also, I would say 1gb of vram is a little overkill for games that the 4850 can handle, but you love swapping out textures for huge ones, so maybe it will actually come in handy.

 

[Asus]

The 4850 is an awesome card to upgrade to and it is in your price range so now is a good time.

Prices are always dropping but I'm not sure how much the 4850 would drop coming up. Nvidia comes out with their expensive new card and ATI may drop prices on their 5000 series but since Nvida isn't coming out in force I don't see how much trickle down effect it would have on the 4850 until fall? Although if you really like the 5850 maybe it would then be in your price range.

 

[VirusType2]

Great information, thanks everyone.

So the remaining question is - is it 'safe' to buy an open box video card or is that a really bad idea? I won't want to pay to ship it back, I'll tell you that much. Do they test them before re-selling them?

Found answer: http://www.newegg.com/HelpInfo/FAQDetail.aspx?Module=5

Sounds like they are untested and may be missing accessories.

Also, I would say 1gb of vram is a little overkill for games that the 4850 can handle, but you love swapping out textures for huge ones, so maybe it will actually come in handy.

Yep, I was thinking the same thing.

 

[xcellerate]

I've been thinking of upgrading my 8800GTS to an HD 5750. The price just dropped on newegg so now I'm thinking even harder.

This would be a pretty big performance jump right?

 

[Quixoticism]

You would notice an increase in performance but it's not going to be anything amazing.

 

[xcellerate]

what would you recommend (sub $200) over the 5750?

 

[Quixoticism]

If you can find a 4890 that would be the best. Other than that I'd just hold out a little longer.

 

[xcellerate]

you're just trying to cut it close aren't you, newegg only has 1 (visiontek) and it's $199.99 -_-

 

[Quixoticism]

So it seems. ATI is phasing out those cards but rumors are that there should be a 5830 coming that will take it's place performance/price wise.

 

[Acepilotf14]

I love my 4850 so much.
although I wonder if I shouldn't have just spent the little extra and went for the 4870.

 

[Asus]

Which 8800GTS do you have? 320MB and 640MB versions are older versions. The 512MB version is a lot better even if it has the same name. In fact that one is just a little slower than the 8800 Ultra. Similar to a GTX.

If you are looking at a 5000 series card I would wait until Nvidia's DX11 stuff is in stores and see what ATI prices do. Or maybe wait until Fall when ATI does their 5000 card refresh (faster clocks and/or lower heat).

 

[xcellerate]

I've got the 640MB version, code G80, revision A3.

According to cpuID:
core: 513mhz
shaders: 1188mhz
memory: GDDR3 792mhz
bus: 320bits

 

[VirusType2]

The 4850 is an awesome card to upgrade to and it is in your price range so now is a good time.

Prices are always dropping but I'm not sure how much the 4850 would drop coming up. Nvidia comes out with their expensive new card and ATI may drop prices on their 5000 series but since Nvida isn't coming out in force I don't see how much trickle down effect it would have on the 4850 until fall? Although if you really like the 5850 maybe it would then be in your price range.

What do you think the prices of the 5000 series will be like in fall?

For example, the 5970's are $650-$700 right now.

* $700... These were initially $549-$599, and now the cards are running upwards of $700-$800 due to card shortages.

This is the fastest card on the planet.

I really just want to buy 1 card. 1 card that will get the most out of my i5-750 without the CPU being a bottle-neck.

 

[xcellerate]

I just installed MSI's 5770. HUGE step up from my old 640mb 8800gts. I don't have any new games to really test but it runs crysis on high smooth as butter; where as my old card was stuttering a lot on medium.