# ATI HD4850 Vs. NVidia GTX280



## layzee (Jul 14, 2008)

Well there's a bit of a GRAPHICS RACE going on between NVidia and ATI (now AMD) for quite sometime now. Whenever there was a new launch NVidia did manage to outdo ATI. After a long time ATI have come up with a new and improved warrior code-named the RV770 XT, the GPU that powers the HD4870 based cards. NVidia on the other hand (although earlier than their arch-rival) had launched the GTX280 which is one heck of a card with 240 stream processors. The new ATI cards have 800 stream processors which has caught the attention of many but what's the truth behind ATI's architecture...

The architecture followed by NVidia and ATI are quite different. In the NVidia cards, each programmable Shader can perform five operations namely ADD, SUBTRACT, MULTIPLY, DIVIDE and MODULUS whereas in the ATI cards each shader can perform only one of the above operations. So, in case of the Radeon cards five shaders are incoporated into a unit which can perform all of the above operations but suppose when an ADD instruction is sent to an unit only one of the shaders can perform that job from which it turns out that the rest four shaders are useless for the moment! This is true for any other operation also because as said above each ATI shader can perform specifically one operation and each unit has one ADD shader, one SUBTRACT shader, one MULTIPLY shader, one DIVIDE shader and one MODULUS shader.

Eight-hundred Stream Processors may sound big but the truth behind is hidden... The Effective number of shader in the RV770 is therefore 800/5 = 160 which is by far much lesser than NVidia's 240 Stream Processors on the GTX 280. But ATI does make up with it with GDDR5 memory which has a much larger bandwidth (and also lesser power consumption) than the GDDR3 memory used by the GTX 280 cards. This makes the HD 4870 have an edge over the GTX 280 by a slight margin for now. But it has been a boon for us since will experience greater price drops in lesser intervals!

For now the HD4870 is the winner but I sincerely hope that NVidia will come up with some monster from hell within the next 6 months. ATI's legacy may be short-lived...


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## Jayanth.M.P (Jul 14, 2008)

comparing a $299 with a $649 is not right.....but even then ATI wins.....


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## layzee (Jul 14, 2008)

I feel that there will be a big price drop for the NVidia cards and for your kind information Jayanth the GTX 280 now costs around $500 !!
Looking forward to get the 9600GT for under 7K and the 9800GTX under 14K...


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## dOm1naTOr (Jul 14, 2008)

both architecture are good, if games come optimised for it...ok ok..enuf of the architecture description. Anadtech has a detailed comparison. 
BTW everyone shud know one thing
its not actually HD 4870 vs GTX 280
but HD 4870 X2 vs GTX 280.
even then the X2 will be cheaper, at 400$ and GTX 280 still costs 450$.
All know there wud be no comparison b/w X2 vs GTS 280 in performance, but the winner comes for cheap.

btw the poll has no connection with the topic.....i think nobody in here will be havin GTX 280 or HD 4870, and the poll is bout the brand if card one owns..........
and nvidia wins hands down in that.


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## desiibond (Jul 14, 2008)

yeah. ATI is back with a bang. This new architecture is gonna take them to new level. It is predicted that with 4850 and 4870 ATI will grab atleast 10% market share from nVidia.


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## jck (Dec 21, 2008)

lol
did u mean 4870?


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## Hitboxx (Dec 21, 2008)

Why are you going on bumping old threads? Do you even see the date?


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