ATI 4800 series cards.. anyone know how they perform here?

[Dogman5]

Incase anyone has been living under a rock for the past week or so, the ATI 4850 and 4870 just came out. These cards are powerhouses, look at bioshock gains for example to get an idea of what this thing can do.

are there any significant gains for gamecube emulation as well? Last time I looked into it it was still in the 15fps area but im wondering if this has changed this to a point where maybe the 25fps range is possible.. Notice the 4870 is a $300 single cpu card hanging with nvidias $600(+?) 2xcpu card as well as beating nvidias 8800s in SLI. .. just placed an order for one, but looking to see what others results were.

 

[Agozer]

In emulation the graphics card does only the very mential task of displaying graphics on-screen. It doesn't really do any graphics intensive work like it does in PC games. It just renders the graphics after that CPU has done most of the work and just sends the graphics card the go to display stuff on your screen.

So it doesn't matter how powerful your graphics card is. Benefits are negligible at best. What matters is how powerful your CPU is.

 

[Knuckles]

most of the video rendering is actually done by the CPU. so even if you turned on max graphic quality on your video cards, performance drop wouldn't even be noticable.

 

[[SS] Starscream]

I think people think GC emulation is like the PCSX2 emulator where the video card actually matters. For some reason GC emulation is not dependent at all on your video card.

People here like to say that your PC is not fast enough to run the GC emulator. I say the emulator is not fast enough to run on todays PC's when it should be.

The code is so tough to get right it could run on todays PC's but there are so many things wrong with the emulator that it has no chance to run correctly.

 

[NJ7]

I just bought a ATI Radeon HD 4850, and while the fps is up over the onboard I had....the emulator shows no improvement graphics wise....

 

[Dogman5]

Ahh, okay guys thanks for clearing this up. I actually had no idea that emulation was most demanding for the CPU and not the GPU.. good to know. but not that good to know! I was hoping that maybe I would be able to emulate some of the GCN titles that I missed out on. Its tough going back to 480p after playing games at 1080p/4X aa lol.

Anyway, NJ7 how are you liking the card? This thing is powerhouse for $165. Just an outrage! Highly recommended if anyone is looking for a new video card :blink:

 

[NJ7]

I'm enjoying the card....great to play games like Crysis and C&C3 finally.....my onboard woulldn't play either one.....