Sunnyvale (CA) - AMD announced today a sub-$150 ATI Radeon HD 4830 card positioned against Nvidia's GeForce 9800 GT. It has full support for DirectX 10.1, CrossFire, and claims better gaming performance in Call of Duty, Devil May Cry 4, ET: Quake Wars, Crysis, Half-Life 2: Episode 2, and Company of Heroes, all in 1920 x 1200 high quality mode with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled. AMD also announced playable frame rates above 30fps at up to 2560 x 1600 in some games.


Gaming specs

All tests conducted by AMD used Intel's Core 2 Extreme QX9650 CPU in an ASUS P5E motherboard, 4GB DDR2-800 memory (timings: 5-5-5-18), Windows Vista Ultimate 64bit, ATI display driver 8.53-RC3, Nvidia display driver 177.79, on an ATI Radeon HD 4830 512MB GDDR3 against a similar Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT 512MB GDDR3. The test results demonstrated better gaming performance with AMD's 4830 using the following game settings:

Game	Horizontal	Vertical	Settings
Call of Duty 4	1920	1200	4xAA+AF
Devil May Cry 4	1920	1200	4xAA+AF
ET: Quake Wars	1920	1200	4xAA+AF
Crysis (DX10)	1920	1200	2xAA+AF HQ Mode
Half-Life 2: Episode 2	1920	1200	8xAA+AF
Company of Heros (DX10)	1920	1200	8xAA+AF

AMD claims greater frame rates using the above settings, and in addition claims greater than 30fps rates while Nvidia's GeForce 9800 GT has less than 30fps rates with the following settings:

Game	Horizontal	Vertical	Settings
Devil May Cry 4	1920	1200	8xAA+AF
ET: Quake Wars	1920	1200	8xAA+AF
Company of Heros (DX10)	2560	1600	4xAA+AF

Availability

Three manufacturers, Sapphire, HIS and PowerColor, are currently selling Radeon HD 4830 products on NewEgg.com for $129.99 with mail-in rebates of $10 or $15, making the price $119.99 or $114.99, with additional shipping of $8.25. Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT models are comparably priced between $124.99 and $129.99 on NewEgg.com. 


Specs

512MB of 256-bit GDDR3 memory, 640 Stream Processing Units, 400 MHz RAMDAC, 1800MHz memory clock, DirectX 10.1, OpenGL 2.1, 1 HDMI (via adapter, 2 DVI, HDTV via S-Video Out, up to 2560 x 1600 video, CrossFire enabled, 6 Pin power support as well as dual-link DVI support atop a PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus.

Isn't it odd?

Oct 23, 2008 09:15     

How AMD are Using an Intel CPU powered rig to test their graphics cards, shouldn't they really be using their own top of the range Phenom line?
Scott Sutherland report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +3

who cares..

Oct 23, 2008 09:40     

who cares if it's 30 fps more when both can get close to 90 fps in those games.
Jonas report abuse vote down vote up Votes: -3

Re: Isn't it odd?

Oct 23, 2008 09:56     

I was thinking the exact same thing when I started reading this article. However, good job AMD for getting a graphics card out there that will compete with Nvidia. Note to anyone at AMD... you really need to get that stock price up though, you're killin me. You should be at least a 5.00 - 6.00 stock.
Henrik report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

whoa!!!! amd using intel cpus

Oct 23, 2008 12:43     

what does this tell you about their confidence on their own chips?
boo report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +0

how about better drivers...

Oct 23, 2008 12:45     

just once i would love to see an article that said nvidia/ati released drivers that actually worked flawlessly... I'm tired of this "faster" race. Nvidia drivers 178.13 claimed 10% faster but failed to mention that Warcraft 3 didnt even render properly... Why doesnt tomshardware ever cover things like that.
karl report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +5

does it really matter any more?

Oct 23, 2008 12:59     

I think graphic card already way pass what the game software are throwing at them. I have a top card from 2-3 yrs ago and is still good on 99% of the gams out there. who need 1000 frame rate when your monitor only display 30-60 a sec.
yo report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +4

Mingo

Oct 24, 2008 02:51     

The graphics card industry is not ahead of the game software industry. People upgrade their cards to player newer games and/or especially to completely max out all of the settings (aa/af filters cost a ridiculous amount of gpu power). lol if you're getting 1000fps, maybe it's time to stop playing StarCraft on a 5" monitor? Last time I checked, even SLI-GTX 280's can't get anywhere near 60 fps with Crysis, very high, 2560x1600 and maxed AA/AF.

Mingo report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +1

the problem

Oct 24, 2008 09:34     

Developers are too worried about having the most advanced graphics engine in their games. I've never had to upgrade my computer as much as I've had to in the past 2 years. Ever since Doom 3 came out, the GPU market has just gotten ridiculous.
jason report abuse vote down vote up Votes: +1