Price-to-Performance Analysis

Let’s get back to the very first diagram of our today’s article but without the graphics cards that didn’t participate in our today’s test session:

Now let’s calculate the recommended retail price of the tested graphics cards in percentage, where 100% is the price of the fastest solution – Radeon HD 4890:

If it is not quite clear, let me explain that according to this diagram Radeon HD 4870 costs 29% less than Radeon HD 4890, and the price of the latter is 88% lower than the price of the dual-processor Radeon HD 4870 X2.

And now let’s find the average performance ratio between all graphics cards according to their AVG FPS in all gaming tests (you can take a look at the complete results table here) in two quality modes. After that we will compare the percentage differences from the first diagram with what we have here:

So what do we see? For example, we see that Radeon HD 4650 and 4670 cost 77% and 78% cheaper than Radeon HD 4890 and their performance is 73-76% and 75-80% lower depending on the image quality mode. After comparison against Radeon HD 4890 price and performance, the best choices in terms of price-to-performance ratio will be Radeon HD 4770 and Radeon HD 4870, because the performance difference between them and the HD 4890 card is smaller than the price difference. However, Radeon HD 4870 X2 can hardly be considered a good purchase, even despite the impressive performance advantage over Radeon HD 4890, because it is almost twice as expensive as the HD 4890, but provides only 50% performance improvement compared with the latter.