ATi 4850 vs nVidia 8800 Ultra Comparison

Part 1: 4850 vs 8800 Benchmarks

The first set of benchmarks compare the 4850 against the 8800 Ultra using common settings. The AA levels used below are either 4xMSAA or 8xMSAA (8xQ on nVidia). SS is transparency super-sampling which is the same as quality adaptive anti-aliasing on the Radeon. This is apples vs apples testing.

The % change column shows the percentage gain or loss resulting in the move to the 4850 from the 8800 Ultra. If the value is orange the 4850 wins; if it’s green the 8800 Ultra wins.

For some reason the 4850 absolutely loves Doom 3 where it totally demolishes the 8800 Ultra; even at 24xAA (see the benchmarks later) it’s the same speed as the 8800 Ultra is at 8xMSAA. I even used Ultra quality textures which generally hammer 512 MB cards.

The 4850 also scores a great victory in Crysis without AA which is very handy for this demanding next generation title, though it does lose with AA, probably because of a lack of VRAM size and/or bandwidth.

Removing the two large victories as they somewhat skew my limited testing base, we can see an average performance loss of 8.76% which is quite good considering what a monster the 8800 Ultra was, both in terms of physical size and memory specs. The 4850 only has around 60% memory bandwidth and 66% memory size of the 8800 Ultra.

Here’s a comparison chart of the same results: