ATi 4850 vs nVidia 8800 Ultra Comparison

Introduction

My 8800 Ultra died outside of warranty so I picked up a 4850 for interim purposes that will become my backup card once I pick up a high-end card as a proper replacement. Unfortunately since I wasn’t expecting the 8800 to die, I only managed to get a few benchmarks with recent drivers which I can compare to the 4850, but I still hope you find the results interesting.

Hardware

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 (reference 3 GHz clock).
• Gigabyte GA-G33M-DS2R (Intel G33 chipset, F7 BIOS).
• 4 GB DDR2-800 RAM (4×1 GB, dual-channel).
• X-Fi XtremeMusic.
• nVidia GeForce 8800 Ultra (768 MB, reference clocks).
• ATi Radeon 4850 (512 MB, reference clocks).

Software

• ATi Catalyst 8.8, high quality mip-mapping.
• nVidia Forceware 177.83, high quality, optimizations off, LOD clamp.
• Windows XP 32 bit SP3.
• DirectX August 2008.
• All games patched to latest versions.

Settings

• 16xAF forced on, vsync forced off (driver).
• Highest quality sound (stereo) used in all games.
• All results are an average framerate.