Available since last summer, the Radeon HD 4870 is a very popular card and is available in numerous versions. We decided to take a closer look at the manufacturer solutions marketed by AMD’s different partners by carrying out as complete a comparison as possible so as to be able to advise you on the best models.
Radeon HD 4870
AMD surprised everyone with the RV770, aka Radeon 4800. This 956 million transistor GPU is particularly effective. A design optimised for maximum efficiency coupled with a 55 nm fabrication process has allowed AMD to compete with NVIDIA’s GT200, much larger but with only slightly better performance levels.
The Radeon HD 4800 has over 800 processing units shared in 160 groups of 5 (vector not scalar units). Although vector units are less efficient than scalar units, unit for unit, you can fit a lot more on the same surface area.
Ever prioritising efficiency, AMD settled for a 256 bit memory bus but with GDDR5 memory which gives it an equivalent bandwidth to that of NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 200, which has a 512 bit memory bus but only supports GDDR3.
We have already covered the technical differences between these GPUs
here and we also covered the performances of these cards
recently. Here then, we concentrate on the different Radeon HD 4870s available on the market.
