Sapphire HD 4850 Under Scope

Even before the launch of ATI's latest graphics cards, some manufacturers, including Sapphire, announced their own RV770-based video boards. The new ATI card promised a lot, especially the 55nm technology which is believed to be an evolutionary step in the industry. Given the facts, we have the new Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 graphics card on display, a classic ATI red design and a single-slot cooling solution.

The level of performance the Sapphire HD 4850 delivers to the mainstream user is a leveraged one, as it comes with 512MB of GDDR3 memory, as well as nominal clock speeds of 625MHz for the core and 993MHz for the memory. The card uses a PCI-Express Gen2 interface and features dual connectors for CrossFireX cables, meaning that two more cards can be connected together on a CrossFireX compatible main board to deliver even higher performance levels.

As all Sapphire graphics cards in the HD 4800 series do, HD 4850 features the latest ATI Avivo HD Technology to enhance video display, as well as a new generation of Unified Video decoder (UVD), which offloads the CPU and can also deliver smooth Blu-ray and HD DVD content decoding. As for the output connectors, the Sapphire HD 4850 offers dual-link DVI outputs, TV-Out, and a dedicated HDMI, allowing users to connect it to a HDMI ready display.

Compared to the 4870 model, Sapphire HD 4850 stands a little behind, but still has a lot to offer. It supports DirectX 10 and Shader Model 4.0, features a quiet fan under normal operations, comes with 1080p HDMI Audio and Video support for HDCP output, and also introduces the new TeraScale Graphics Engine technology. It supports CrossFireX functionality, features 24x Custom filter anti-aliasing (CFAA), and has a 5 GBps PCI Express 2.0 graphics interface.

All looks pretty well until now, but the new card shows some minuses when taking a closer look. The obvious thing is that it does not feature GDDR5, as Radeon HD 4870 does, which means that its power is somehow diminished. Besides, tests conducted by Benchmark Reviews show that it performs as fast as Nvidia's GeForce 9800 GTX, but it does not go in front of it. We were expecting at least that, not to mention more power-efficiency, which was still missed in the development process.

As the competition between Nvidia and ATI is something we have to always consider, it seems that ATI should have done a little better with its latest graphics card. Its competitor has reduced prices for the graphics card especially to gain more market share. And since Nvidia's latest boards have the same features as Radeon 4850 and 4870, but perform a little better, ATI should step on it and make some improvements soon enough.