In the last few months the mid-range and high-end graphics card market has once again become a battleground between the two heavyweights, AMD and NVIDIA. There was a time where ATI slipped a bit with the release of their R600 and it seemed like NVIDIA was going to run away with the graphics card market once and for all with the GeForce 8800 series. Luckily for all of us things began to brighten considerably for the boys in red when they introduced their RV670 core with the Radeon HD 3800 series and eventually the Radeon HD 3870 X2. These cards were greeted with enthusiasm but in the end the RV670 core was nothing more than a die shrink of the infamous R600. - Hardware Canucks

Palit Radeon HD 4870 512MB Graphics Board Review

Hot on the heels of what could only be called an extremely successful product launch particularly with the Radeon HD 3870, AMD is now poised to give us a completely new architecture in the form of the R770 core which adorns both the Radeon HD 4850 and the Radeon HD 4870. The Radeon HD 4870 512MB represents quite a few firsts in the consumer graphics card world. It is the first single chip 1.2 teraflop card, the first implementation of GDDR5 memory and the first single chip AMD graphics card above the $290 price point in quite some time. This card offers a whooping 800 stream processors which is quite a lot.

There has also been a ramp in the number of texture units to 40 which should improve performance by leaps and bounds even though the raster operating units stay at 16 only. Both of these GPU's are fabricated using 55nm manufacturing process and feature HDCP, native HDMI support and DirectX 10.1 compatibility. Without a doubt the packaging of this card is flashy in the extreme with Palit’s bazooka toting frog taking front and center stage. It has been a while since we have seen a unique packaging scheme used with a graphics card and this one takes a bit of a different turn as opposed to most others on the market.

The interior of the box doesn’t really show us anything different from what we have seen literally a million times before. The accessory bundle which comes with the Palit Radeon HD 4870 is complete but not overly generous. It has been a hard two years for ATI and we know that many people out there have been counting down the days until the boys in red returned to competitiveness. Well ladies and gents, the wait is over because the Radeon HD 4870 has shown us that ATI has come out with all guns blazing. And that means that AMD is ready once again to go head to head with NVIDIA and able to keep the price down.

When you look at the performance we received through nearly every one of the tests we put the Radeon HD 4870 through, it becomes obvious that this card was built for a high image quality DirectX 10 environment. What stunned me the most what how much a performance increase the inclusion of GDDR5 memory and a 125MHz core bump have given this card over the Radeon HD 4850. The anti-aliasing implementation comes without any problem at all and it regularly hands out a shellacking to its closest competitors once image quality is turned up. And that is really what was the major pain point for many.

Indeed, in every AMD document I have seen, the Radeon HD 4870 was supposed be competing directly with the GeForce 9800 GTX. Well, they seem to have pulled a fast one on all of us since this card beats the GeForce 9800 GTX until it's black and blue. The Radeon HD 4870 is supposed to have dynamic voltage and clock speed regulation so it will consume very little power when under idle conditions. We are not sure if it was a matter of the feature not working or another issue but the idle power consumption was disappointing to say the least. The other area that we feel needs to be improved is in warranty coverage.

We hardly ever give an award to a newly released graphics card due to the mostly beta nature of performance and various other issues that always seem to pop up. However, the Palit Radeon HD 4870 512MB we have seen today not only bucks past trends but it smashed all of our expectations about how much people have to pay for ass-hauling performance. ATI has taken the approach of putting value before bleeding edge frame rates and this card more than any on the market today proves that they got the formula spot on and then some.