Elite Bastards have a review on their website for the new Sapphire Radeon 4850 512MB graphics card.
RV770 has taken those excellent features, improved upon them in places, and most importantly overhauled every aspect of their architecture that was in need of attention, all while managing to create a GPU which is cheap enough to produce to attack NVIDIA at the most relevant price points for the majority of gamers. Rather than simply throwing more and more shader power at the Radeon HD 4800 series (although this does get a major boost as well), AMD have played smart in improving texture filtering and ROP performance to address their previous areas of concern, and those changes shine through like a blinding light of hope in our testing. Indeed, looking over our real-world testing results, it's almost like an entire reversal of roles when the Radeon HD 4850 is pitted against a reference GeForce 9800 GTX - While previous generations would see AMD's parts ruling the roost without any eye candy enabled but falling well behind with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering turned on, so NVIDIA are now left in exactly the same position. While the GeForce 9800 GTX frequently gets to strut its stuff when rendering 'straight', adding those all-important features to increase image quality that we all know and love sees the Radeon HD 4850 pull away, quite significantly in places.
They also awarded the card with an Elite Performance Award.
To read the full review click here.
