Introduction

For the last year and a half, ATI have been the underdog when it came to top end performance, with nVidia truly ruling the roost with it’s high power GTX cards dominating anything ATI could throw at them. However, now ATI are fighting back with their latest 4 series cards which promise to match the new 2 series from nVidia on performance, while beating them on price. Today I have a 4850 from the kind folks at Sapphire to try out. Let’s see how it stacks up.

Features

• GDDR3 memory 256-bit memory interface
• DirectX® 10.1
• 24x custom filter anti-aliasing (CFAA) and high performance anisotropic filtering
• ATI CrossFireX™ multi-GPU support for highly scalable performance
• Use up to four discrete cards with an AMD 790FX based motherboard
• PCI Express® 2.0 support
• PCI Express® 2.0 supportDynamic geometry acceleration
• Game physics processing capability
• ATI Avivo™HD video and display technologyUnified Video Decoder 2 (UVD)
• ATI PowerPlay™ technology

Specifications

• Display Output: Dual DL-DVI-I+HDTV
• Core Clock: 625 MHz
• Memory Clock: 993MHz, 1986 Mbps.
• PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
• 512MB /256bit GDDR3 memory interface
• Single Slot Active Cooler
• HDMI compliant via dongle
• 7.1 Audio Channel Support
• Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 support
• Shader Model 4.1 support

NB. The full feature and specification lists are much more extensive on the Sapphire website. You can view them here.