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Back in October we had the opportunity to review
Sapphire's take on the HD4870, the Toxic. Overclocked right out
of the box and cooled by the impressive Vapor-X cooler, we knew the
HD4870 Toxic was pretty impressive. Today Sapphire takes this great
card one step further by increasing the memory to 1 GB of GDDR5.
With prices down and the memory up we just might have your next
video card right here!
The
box may not have changed much since the 512 MB version came through
our labs but there are some noticeable updates to the front stickies. It's
definitely good to see that 1GB sticker on display and like it's
512 MB little brother, this isn’t your
typical factory overclocked edition video card.
ATI Radeon™ HD 4850 & ATI Radeon™ HD 4870
- GPU Specifications
Lets take a closer look at the specs from
AMD/ATI:
- 956 million transistors on 55nm fabrication
process
- PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface
- 256-bit GDDR3/4/5 memory interface
-
Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 support
-
Unified Superscalar Shader
Architecture
- 800 stream processing
units
- Dynamic Geometry Acceleration
-
Anti-aliasing features
- Multi-sample anti-aliasing
(2, 4, or 8 samples per pixel)
- Up to 24x Custom Filter
Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality
-
Texture filtering features
- 2x/4x/8x/16x high quality
adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per
pixel)
- 128-bit floating point HDR
texture filtering
- OpenGL 2.1 support
-
ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display
Platform6
- Unified Video Decoder
2 (UVD 2) for H.264/AVC, VC-1, and MPEG-2 video formats
- Hardware DivX and MPEG-1
video decode acceleration
- Accelerated video
transcoding & encoding for H.264 and MPEG-2 formats
- ATI Avivo Video Post
Processor6
- Two independent
display controllers
-
Two integrated
dual-link DVI display outputs
-
Each supports
18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions
up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600
(dual-link DVI)2
-
Each includes a
dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high
resolution playback of protected content3
-
Two integrated 400
MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
-
Each supports
analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up
to 2048x15362
-
DisplayPort output
support
-
24- and 30-bit
displays at all resolutions up to 2560x16002
-
HDMI output support
-
All display
resolutions up to 1920x10802
-
Integrated HD
audio controller with support for stereo and
multi-channel (up to 7.1) audio formats, including AC-3,
AAC, DTS, DTS-HD & Dolby True-HD4,
enabling a plug-and-play audio solution over HDMI
-
Integrated AMD
Xilleon™ HDTV encoder
- Provides high quality
analog TV output (component/S-video/composite)
- Supports SDTV and
HDTV resolutions
- Underscan and
overscan compensation
- Seamless integration of
pixel shaders with video in real time
- VGA mode support on all
display outputs
-
ATI PowerPlay™ Technology5
- Advanced power management
technology for optimal performance and power savings
-
Performance-on-Demand
- Constantly monitors
GPU activity, dynamically adjusting clocks and voltage
based on user scenario
- Clock and memory
speed throttling
- Voltage switching
- Dynamic clock gating
- Central thermal
management – on-chip sensor monitors GPU temperature and
triggers thermal actions as required
-
ATI CrossFireX™ Multi-GPU Technology
- Scale up rendering
performance and image quality with two, three, or four GPUs
- Integrated compositing
engine
- High performance dual
channel bridge interconnect1
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