Performance in Synthetic Benchmarks

Fillrate

“Pure” fillrate of ATI Radeon HD 4850 is lower than that of ATI Radeon HD 3870. it can be explained by lower graphics core frequency and as a result, lower RBE/ROP frequency as well as lower memory bandwidth.

When it comes to Z-buffer operations, we see a definite performance increase. Even though RV770 has twice the Z processing units, the performance numbers do not double, as you may have expected them to. The performance gain is about 13% - not quite what we expected from the newcomer. However, taking into consideration lower core frequency of the 4850 model compared with 3870, the modest performance gain we see is quite natural.

From 2 textures on, ATI Radeon HD 4850 starts showing its advantages over the rivals, which is definitely the result of ATI engineers’ optimizations. Only in case of four textures 4850 yields a little to Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX, but even in this case the lag is less than 10%.

As you can see, raster processors are no bottleneck for the new ATI Radeon HD 4800: even the youngest model in this lineup can compete on equal terms with Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX, despite lower core frequency.