Sapphire Radeon HD4670 Video Card Review

Okay, so we got that technical crap out of the way.  It’s time to play some games.  I am going to test the abilities of the HD 4670 on Left 4 Dead, Fallout 3, as well as Rise of the Argonauts.  Then I will do a little technical goofing for the sake of proof so you wankers don’t try to call BS.  See?  I think ahead of the curve.  Because I see all of you standing there with baseball bats and railroad spikes.But first, here are the goods on my test machine:

• ECS-USA GeForce 6100PM-M2 motherboard
• Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Dual Core Processor (overclocked to 2.2Ghz)
• 2GB Samsung 800Mhz RAM
• 320GB Baraccuda HDD SATA
• Microsoft Vista Ultimate SP1 (32-bit)
• DirectX 10

	Core Clock Speed FLOPS Memory Clock Pixel Fill Rate Shader Clock Speed Texture Fill Rate Radeon HD 4670 750Mhz 480 1000Mhz 6000 750Mhz 24000 Radeon HD 4870 X2 750Mhz 2400 1800Mhz 24000 750Mhz 60000 GeForce 8800GS 550Mhz 264 800Mhz 6600 1375Mhz 26400 GeForce 9500 550Mhz 134.4 800Mhz 4400 1400Mhz 8800

To begin, I’m going to boot up a healthy dose of L4D and see what this bitch is capable of.  During the load screens, using FRAPS, I was getting a frame rate of less than 10, which is normal for a load screen.  I never seem to control the feeling of dread when I see low fps, however.  My fears were soon relieved when I saw a near constant 60fps with all settings on High at 1028×786.  Crystal clear picture with no chop whatsoever.  ATI is slowly making me a believer, but they are going to have to try harder.  Valve’s Source Engine allows most cards to play very well.  Up next, I am going to test out Rise of the Argonauts.

On my motherboard’s onboard video, I was able to play Left 4 Dead at its lowest settings.  That was running 128Mb of shared video RAM.  But when I tried to play ROTA, I could barely make it through the load screen.  I quit soon after, when it took too long to try and position my cursor over the options menus due to the low frame rate.  Hopefully, the 4670 will do a better job.

Onboard was easily trumped (as if there was a surprise in store there..) by the Radeon right away on the main menu screen.  A beautiful view of Iolcus from the air, birds flying by, clouds whisping along lazily.  It was beautiful.  And it was actually moving instead of skipping along like a scratched DVD.  The gameplay was nice too, dipping no lower than 30fps with a resolution of 1028×786.  The only problem with ROTA is that the game auto-adjusts to your video card and doesn’t give you any options to play around with.  So, with a bowed head, I give you what the game had to offer, which wasn’t all that bad and was very playable.  Lows of 30 and Highs of 60 beats the hell out of 6FPS any day of the week.

I am going to attempt to play Fallout 3.  I am brand new to this game, as my gaming experience for some reason never lead me to either of the previous Fallouts.  So this is also my virgin experience with any of the Fallout games.  Might as well make it happen during test time right?  Maybe I’ll kick ass and look good in front of all you people on my first try.  Yeah, and maybe Obama will replace “Hail to the Chief” with “We takin’ over”.  What?  I thought it was funny.  That’s what I would do.  You pasty white folk have it coming’ and you know it.

I was able to play Fallout without a problem using a 1280×720 resolution and on Medium settings.  I tried going for the highest settings, but found the gameplay wanting and a bit choppy.  It got decidedly more so during scenes that had a lot of shadows and entities around me.  However, I did manage to keep a frame rate above 25fps on high settings, and 40-60fps when on medium settings.

Lastly, I decided to benchmark the video card using two different programs that are near and dear to my heart.  Using SiSoftware Sandra, I compared the 4670 against three other video cards on the market, including the Nvidia 9500.  Along with the other two cards, the 4670 came very close to the results of the 9500, with a mere margin of difference between each of them.  The 4670’s bandwith was rated at around 3.9GBs when connected to a PCI-express 2.0 x16 enabled motherboard.  For the average/above average gamer, that is more than enough power to knock around a few bad guys in a desolate post-nuclear world.