Windows Benchmarks, Continued

Quake 4

Like Unreal Tournament 2004, Quake 4 is a slightly older engine. It remains relevant in that many games still use the engine such as Doom 3 and Quake Wars, and it also has a Linux port. Quake 4 was benchmarked using the highest settings available.

Half-Life 2

Half-Life 2 remains one of the most popular game engines due to the various "Source" games Valve has released, such as Counter-Strike: Source. Additionally, many incremental updates have been added to the game with the episode-style updates Valve released for the game. Half-Life 2 was benchmarked with both Episodes installed, and all settings set to the maximum available.

3dMark06

The benchmark is about two years old now, but still an effective way to look at a video card's performance.

3dMark Vantage

Futuremark's latest gaming benchmark is the pinnacle of gaming benchmarks and technology, as it may very well bring any setup to its very knees. Through a series of DirectX 10.1, Physics, and CPU tests, 3dMark Vantage measures every ounce of performance that a system is capable of, in every area the latest games utilize.

Conclusion on Windows Benchmarks

What more is there to say beyond the fact that the Sapphire Radeon HD4850 blows past the competition? No, really. I wasn't entirely sure what to expect from the card, especially in 3dMark Vantage after seeing the GeForce 9600's performance a few days earlier. The extra transistors the Radeon HD4850 has over the Radeon HD3870 sure make a difference.

From older games such as Quake 4 and Unreal Tournament 2004, to the latest games such as Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3, the Radeon HD4850 offers numerous improvements. As ATI's flagship series, the Radeon HD48xx series holds its own against ATI's previous families, as well as against nVidia's offerings.

Sapphire also included videos and wallpapers on the USB sampler that was included with the card, which all required Windows Media Player 9 or higher. I didn't expect to find any games on the USB drive, but these were included with the "Ruby Rom 1.1" disc. All the games played as smoothly as I could imagine under Windows Vista 64-bit, but I imagine performance would have been better in a 32-bit environment.